ALCOHOLIC POISON,
Intemperance and Insanity.
Intemperance, more than any other cause,
fills our lunatic and idiot asylums. According
to the statistics of insanity in France, thirty-four
per cent. of the cases of lunacy among males were
due to intemperance. One-half of the inmates of
the Dublin insane asylum owe their disease to
the use of liquor.
Lord Shaftesbury, chairman of the English
Commission on Lunacy, in his report to parlia-
ment stated that six out of every ten lunatics in
the asylums were made such by alcohol.
Dr. S. G. Howe found that the parents of
one hundred and forty-five out of three hundred
idiots were habitual drunkards,
The Use of Alcohol Shortens Life.
It is very easy to prove that the influence
of alcohol, as of every other poison, is to shorten
life. Dr. Willard Parker, of New York, shows
from statistics that for every ten temperate per-
sons who die between the ages of twenty-one
and thirty, fifty-one intemperate persons die.
Thus it appears that the mortality of liquor-users
Is five hundred per cent. greater than that of
temperate persons. These statements were based
on the tables used by life insurance companies.
According to the calculations of life insurance
experts, the expectancy for life of a temperate
person at the age of twenty years is forty-four
years. The expectancy of an intemperate person,
at the same age, is only fifteen years.
ITS MORAL AND SOCIAL EFFECTS, 39
Between 60,000 and 100,000 persons die annu-
ally in this country alone from the effects of
liquor. The same number die in England from
the same cause. Then in these two Christian
countries a human being dies every two and
one-half minutes from alcoholic poisoning,
The graves of the victims, allowing twelve
square feet for each, would in fifty years nearly
cover a township. Arranged end to end, their
coffins would make a continuous line from Cape
Horn to the North Pole,
Arranged in one long funeral procession, with
a hearse and a single vehicle for mourners for
each, this vast army of dead drunkards would
occupy two and a half years in passing a given
point, and would wind two and one-half times
around the globe.
Alcohol Predisposes the System to Disease.
Dr. Anderson, of Glasgow, says, “I have found
the use of alcoholic drinks to be the most power-
tul predisposing cause of malignant cliolera with
which I am acquainted. In Warsaw, ninety
per cent. of all who died of cholera during the
epidemic of 1832 were habitual drinkers.” Inthe
city of Tiflis, containing 20,000 inhabitants,
every drunkard was swept away by cholera.
In the Park hospital, New York, there were two
hundred and four cases of cholera during an epi-
demic of the disease. Of these, only six were
temperate, and they recovered, while two-thirds
of the remainder died.