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CHAPTER XXIX

THE CASE OF THE CHILDREN AGAINST CELL POISON

For years teachers have been wondering why some children are dull and others bright in school; why some remember where others forget; why some are healthy and others diseased; why the power of will is strong in some, weak in others.

These and other questions have been asked a thousand times. But, even yet, the full answer cannot be given. Certain investigations, however, have thrown a good deal of light on the subject.

Dr. Bayer, director of a primary school in Vienna, Austria, studied the habits of the five hundred and ninety-one boys and girls in his school, and thought he had found some excuse for the dull ones. He published his discovery so that other teachers and pupils might know how to change their records if they cared to.

In Austria beer is the great standby as a drink, and this table shows what relation there seemed to be between the scholarship of those Viennese children and their beerdrinking habits. Do not try to remember the tables given in this chapter, but remember the lessons they teach.

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Notice how the proportion of dullards mounts upward on the last column as the beer increases. Three beers a day seems to have put two thirds of the drinkers in the lowest rank.

No doubt some of these children had been studying hard and had wondered why they could not learn their lessons as well as their friends did. And no doubt, when they saw this beer record, they made some change in their habits. Still this is not stated.

From the knowledge we already have of the power of alcohol over the cell, we are not surprised to hear that the beer-drinking children were handicapped from the start. They were not to blame, surely, for they used the beer through ignorance. In all probability their parents were not to blame either, for multitudes of even middleaged people have not as yet heard of these recent scientific discoveries about the effect of alcohol on living cells. For us, however, the record simply proves that

alcohol hampers children no less than it hampers automobile drivers, typesetters, dogs, jellyfish, and the water flea.

Nevertheless, the most recent charge against alcohol is not simply that, by using it, men and children weaken their own cells, but that very often there is close connection between the drinking habits of parents and the failure of the minds of their children.

Dr. Howe was once asked to study the life history of those children in Massachusetts who have no mindsidiots we call them. He did the work thoroughly, became acquainted with the history of three hundred of these deplorably unfortunate young people, and discovered that one hundred and forty-five of them were the children of drunkards.

In his book called American Charities, Dr. Warner gives the case of a family in which the older children had strong bodies and strong minds, while three of the younger children were complete idiots and the fourth was defective in his mind. It seems that before the first children were born the father was a temperate man, that little by little he became intemperate, and that his last four children were born during the time that he was a drunkard.

Dr. Warner also speaks about idiocy in Norway. He says that in 1825 the tax on spirits was removed. This, of course, made it possible for multitudes of people to

indulge in the luxury of alcoholic drinks, who had never been able to afford it before. Perhaps they rejoiced as they did their drinking. The result, however, was an awful curse to very many children who were born in the land after that; for during the first ten years after the tax was removed, the number of idiots born in Norway increased one hundred and fifty per cent. In addition, insanity itself was increased fifty per cent.

Professor Demme in Berne, Switzerland, looked up the intimate history of ten families who drank and of ten families who did not drink, and the record which those parents were making for their children reads now like a page torn from the book of a judgment day.

RECORD OF TEN DRINKING AND TEN ABSTAINING FAMILIES

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Thus far we have been considering the records of the lives of such men as have become drunkards. The great multitudes of those who use alcohol, however, never arrive at this extreme.

I have in mind a certain policeman in New York City. He was talking to a friend of mine, and when the subject of alcohol was reached, he said: “As for

myself, I confess I do drink a little once in a while. You see I began when I was young and didn't know better. And now I sometimes think I can't stop. That's the trouble with alcohol you know. The habit creeps over you slowly and there you are. You can't stop even when you want to."

"And what about your boys?" my friend asked. She knew about his six fine sons, and she knew how proud he was of every one of them.

"That's it,” he said. “There are those boys of mine— three of them in the high school and three in the grammar school, and every one of them high up in his class." He stopped, looked very serious, hesitated for a moment, then went on in a solemn tone and in a low voice: "I've never let those boys of mine see me take a drop. The fact is they don't believe in alcohol. Their mother's taught them that way. That's the sort of mother she is

a fine woman with never a cross word for any of us." And he straightened himself up rather proudly as if from great respect for his wife and his boys.

In talking about it afterwards, my friend said: “It almost frightens me to think of that man. The habit is certainly growing on him. His breath indicates clearly what the end may be. Then what about those boys and that wife of his?" We said little after that, because we both knew what danger the man was running, both for himself and for those who were dearest to him.

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