The people of the world in general, and especially the people of the United States, are asking more questions about the cost of alcohol--not its cost in money, but its cost in men. These are questions which statistics cannot answer, which, indeed, can never be definitely answered; but we know enough to be assured that if answers could be given, they would be appalling. With increasing unanimity the thinkers of the whole world are saying that in alcohol is found the greatest of humanity's curses. It does no good whatever; it does incalculable harm. A dozen substitutes may be found for it in every useful purpose which it serves in medicine, mechanics, and the arts; its food value, of which much has recently been said, is not needed; and it has worked greater havoc in the aggregate than all the plagues. If not another drop of it should ever be distilled, the world would be the gainer, not the loser, through the circumstance. Yet the use of alcohol as a beverage is continually increasing. The number of its victims sums up a growing total. Sentimentalists have failed to cope with it, and the law has failed to cope with it. In combating it, the world must now find some method more effective than any it has yet employed.
When we consider excessive drinkers as a class, we find that a large number of alcoholics are born with tendencies which make alcohol their natural and almost inevitable recourse. As a rule they are naturally highly nervous, or, through some systemic defect, crave abnormally the excitation which alcohol confers. For these reasons, granting favorable opportunity and no great counterbalancing check, they are foredoomed to drink to excess. Some are predisposed to alcoholism by an unstable nervous organism bequeathed to them by intemperate parents or other ancestors; others are drinkers because they do not get enough to eat, or fail, for other reasons than poverty, to be sufficiently nourished; and others, possessing just the favorable type of physique, become alcoholics through worry or grief. All these kinds of people are victims of a habit which, properly speaking, they did not initiate, and of which, therefore, censure must be very largely tempered. Yet they are generally treated as though they had perversely brought about their own disease, a course not more reasonable than the punishment of people for developing nephritis or cancer.