PHYSICAL PURITY.

White Ribbon, Volume 31, Issue 368, 18 February 1926, Page 14

PHYSICAL PURITY.

POWERFUL PLEA FOR PROHIBITION. The following are extracts from an address delivered by Dr. Annie Besant to a great open-air crowd in Madras, India. The address was on the “Value of Purity,” aiu was mainly an earnest plea for prohibition. The address was listened to by about ten thousand people, loud speakers in front of the platform making the speaker’s voice audible by all. The somewhat new point of view will help to dissipate the absurb notion that prohibition is merely a fad of fanatics.

“One of the strongest reasons for the kind of social legislation with which prohibition is con cerned, the getting rid of strong drink from a community, and the importance of it to the whole community, is seen from the standpoint of individual physical purity in the

way that science has taught us to regard it during some years past, so that each of has begun to understand that our own personal condition of body is not a matter which concerns ourselves alone, bit concerns the society in which we live.

Science has shown us by tlie use of the microscope and then by study along lines which few of us can follow accurately in detail, but in which all of us can see and realise the effect* that every one of us, in our physical body, is either a source of health or of spreading disease in the community. Our outside physical bodies, which seem to continue very much the same year after year with only the natural changes that come with growing, are in a continual state of change, that from each of these bodies there passes outward a multitude of minute invisible particles which, falling on people around us, on furniture of our houses, on public vehicles in which people travel from place to place, spread around us, according to the state of our physical bodies, a stream of life-giving forces, of health-giving forces, or they may send around us a stream of forces that lessens the vitality of others and makes them less strong to resist disease. And that thus each of us in our everyday life in the places to which we go, in the articles we use, is affecting our neighbours. As we walk along the street, we send out these invisible particles. They pass on the people, they p:iss on the vehicles, omnibuses, the cars in which we may travel, and those who touch those cars, etc., are a fleeted by what we have left behind us, Invisible to our eyes, but carrying with them the tendency to increasing health or the danger of spreading disease.” “No one goes out of a crowd with exactly the same physical body as lx* came into it. You know how a dog follows his master by the scent that his nose is sharp enough to follow, (hat yours and mine are not able in that way to smell out the track of a man. Imagine for a moment that your eyvs were as acute as the scent of the dog. th('n you would be able to see that which the dog smells, and you could follow the track of a person by the particles that have fallen from his body on those who pass him on the vehicles he was using, leaving the physical trail behind him which affects everyone who touches it by the communication of a part of those

minute fragments of himself which have fallen upon him.”

“Take the case of a drunkard or even of a man who is called a moderate drinker. His body becomes impregnated with the particles of alcohol, and his body becomes affected by the fact that he drinks alcohol. As he goes about any part of the city, or as he lives in his house, he affects all those things around him with the particles of his body which are poisoned by alcoholic drink, if these* particles fall on a sober person, those particles cannot multiply and so will become sterile and will not increase in number; but if they fall upon a body that is physically weak, if they fall upon a body ac customed to drink, they stimulate the desire for intoxicants and tend to make him crave for that which is so absolutely against his health and his welfare, so that the society in which we, all of us live, has the right to protect itself against the poison which is spreading through the air. not only by drink, but by the people who take intoxicants, who first poison their bodies and then send thes«* poisoned particle's as a fountain throws out spray, and, falling on the bodies of others, diminish their vitality, lessen their health and power of resisting disease.”

“You have along this lino of argument a very strong argument for the prohibition of intoxicating drinks, so that there may not be a continual menace to the health of the community by this shedding of injurious matter by those who consume gtron: drink.”