Signs Of A Vigorous Nature: A Taste For Strong Spirits
The taste [of alcohol] once established takes care of itself. In earlier times, when the nature of alcohol was unknown and total abstinence was undreamed of, it was the strong, the boisterous, the energetic, the apostle of “the strenuous life,” who carried all these things to excess. The wassail bowl, the bumper of ale, the flagon of wine,– all these were the attribute of the strong.
We cannot say that those who sank in alcoholism thereby illustrated the survival of the fittest. Who can say that, as the Latin races became temperate, they did not also becomes docile and weak? In other words, considering the influence of alcohol alone, unchecked by an educated conscience, we must admit that it is the strong and vigorous, not the weak and perverted, that are destroyed by it. At best, we can only say that alcoholic selection is a complex force, which makes for temperance—if at all, at a fearful cost of life which without alcoholic temptation would be well worth saving. We cannot easily, with Mr. Reid, regard alcohol as an instrument of race-purification, nor believe that the growth of abstinence and prohibition only prepares the race for a future deeper plunge into dissipation. If France, through wine, has grown temperate, she has grown tame.
“New Mirabeaus,” Carlyle tells us, “one hears not of; the wild kindred has gone out with this, its greatest.” This fact, whatever the cause, is typical of great, strong, turbulent men who led the wild life of Mirabeau because they knew nothing better. The concentration of the energies of France in the one great city of Paris is again a potent agency in the impoverishment of the blood of the rural districts. All great cities are destroyers of life. Scarcely one would hold its own in population over power, were it not for the young men of the farms. In such destruction, Paris has ever taken the lead. The education of the middle classes in France is almost exclusively a preparation for public life.
To be an official in a great city is an almost universal ideal. This ideal but few attain, and the lives of the rest are largely wasted. Not only the would-be official, but artist, poet, musician, physician, or journalist, seeks his career in Paris. A few may find it. The others, discouraged by hopeless effort or vitiated corrosion, faint and fall. Every night some few of these cast themselves into the Seine. Every morning they are brought to the morgue behind the old Church of Notre Dame. It is a long procession and a sad one from the provincial village to the strife and pitfalls of the great city, from hope and joy to absinthe and the morgue.
With all its pitiful aspects the one which concerns us is the steady drain on the life-blood of the nation, its steady lowering of the average of the parent stock of the future. But far more potent for evil to the race than all these influences, large and small, is the one great destroyer,– War. War for glory, war for gain, war for dominion, its effect is the same, whatever its alleged purpose.
David Starr Jordan, excerpted from “The Blood of the Nation” (1910)