Prohibition and Mortality and Morbidity

THE debate between users and nonusers of alcohol has been long, and the end is certainly not yet in sight; but the road to agreement is not impassable, although it is uncommonly rough and steep and is beset by many obstructions. The surest aid to common understanding is in the fact that even prejudiced humans do pay attention to evidence. Prejudice we must take for granted, as none of us is free from it, at least in the sphere of social habits and dietary customs. It is not so much that evidence of harm from the abuse, and even in the moderate or so-called temperate use of alcoholic beverages is more abundant, more exact, or more convincing than in former generations, as that we are today faced with a more compelling series of choices as to our conduct of individual and communal existence. If we are to continue the trend of the past half-century towards fewer offspring, a smaller but more secure child ratio to total population, then security of life, a greater life expectancy, and less interruption of life by preventable illness all become more dominant desires and more urgent social objectives. If we would harness power and speed to achieve material production, transportation, and recreation, as it is within our means to do, incomparably more effectively than ever has been possible in past history or among other races or nations, there are concessions demanded of us in the interest of each other which the robust individualist is loath to make. It behooves us to look backward into past experience, note the facts of record of our own day, weigh and measure the evidence, and seek to understand the trends and tendencies which may reveal themselves, all for the very good object of sparing our descendants some, at least, of the mistakes we have made, and perhaps replacing experiment for them by our own experience

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