ALCOHOL CREATES A PROGRESSIVE APPETITE FOR ITSELF.--When liquor is taken, even in the most moderate quantity, it soon becomes necessary, and then arises a craving demand for an increased amount to produce the original effect. No food creates this constantly augmenting want. A cup of milk drank at dinner does not lead one to go on, day by day, drinking more and more milk, until to get milk becomes the one great longing of the whole being. Yet this is the almost universal effect of alcohol. Hunger is satisfied by any nutritious food: the dram-drinker's thirst demands alcohol. The common experience of mankind teaches us the imminent peril that attends the formation of this progressive poison habit. A single glass taken as a tonic may lead to the drunkard's grave. Worse than this, the alcoholic craving may be transmitted from father to son, and young persons often find themselves cursed with a terrible disease known as alcoholism--a keen, morbid appetite for liquor that demands gratification at any cost--stamped upon their very being through the reckless indulgence of this habit on the part of some one of their ancestors. [Footnote: The American Medical Association, at their meeting in St. Paul, Minnesota (1883), restated in a series of resolutions their conviction, that "alcohol should be classed with other powerful drugs; that when prescribed medically, it should be done with conscientious caution and a sense of great responsibility; that used as a beverage it is productive of a large amount of physical and mental disease; that it _entails diseased and enfeebled constitutions upon offspring_, and that it is the cause of a large percentage of the crime and pauperism of our large cities and country."] THE LAW OF HEREDITY is, in this connection, well worth consideration. "The world is beginning to perceive," says Francis Galton, "that the life of each individual is, in some real sense, a continuation of the lives of his ancestors." "Each of us is the footing up of a double column of figures that goes back to the first pair." "We are omnibuses," remarks Holmes, "in which all our ancestors ride." We inherit from our parents our features, our physical vigor, our mental faculties, and even much of our moral character. Often, when one generation is skipped, the qualities will reappear in the following one. The virtues, as well as the vices, of our forefathers, have added to, or subtracted from, the strength of our brain and muscle. The evil tendencies of our natures, which it is the struggle of our lives to resist, constitute a part of our heirlooms from the past. Our descendants, in turn, will have reason to bless us only if we hand down to them a pure healthy physical, mental, and moral being.