(c) Even a moderate use of alcohol increases liability to disease and shortens the chances of life. In any case of exposure to or contraction of disease, the total abstainer has a proved advantage over even the light drinker. The British life insurance companies reckon that at the age of twenty a total abstainer has an average prospect of life of forty-four years, a temperate regular drinker a prospect of thirty-one years, and a heavy drinker of fifteen years. Many other factors enter into the individual situation, of course; we know many cases where inveterate drinkers have lived to a ripe old age; it takes a great deal to break the iron constitutions of some men. But averages tell the story. An authority on tuberculosis states that "if for no other reason than the prevention of tuberculosis, state prohibition would be justified" The use of alcohol predisposes the body to many kinds of disease; and according to conservative figures, approximately seventy thousand deaths yearly in the United States are caused by alcoholism and diseases that owe their grip to the use of alcohol. Besides this, a great deal of insanity and chronic invalidism, and a large proportion of deaths after operations, are due to this cause. [Footnote: See H. S. Williams, op. cit, pp. 25- 43, 149, 150; H. S. Warner, op. cit, chap. IV, and bibliography at end.] (d) The chances of losing children at chances of begetting feeble-minded or degenerate children, are markedly greater for even moderate drinkers than for abstainers. Children of total abstainers have a great advantage, on the average, in size, stature, bodily vigor, intellectual power; they stand, on the average, between a year and two years ahead in class of the children of moderate drinkers, they have less than half as many eye, ear, and other physical defects. This proved influence of even light drinking upon the vitality and normality transmitted to children should be the most serious of indictments against self-indulgence. Truly the sins of the fathers are visited upon the second and third generation. [Footnote: See Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, vol. IX, p. 234; H. S. Williams, op. cit, pp. 44-47.] (2) The economic waste is enormous: