Immoderate use of stimulants and the varied excesses and vital errors which are grouped under the general head of “dissipation,” a “love of pleasure,” or the still {21} more expressive phrase “a short life and a merry one,” etc., are favorite ways of self-annihilation and leave little to be desired in the completeness with which they do their work. English statisticians formerly estimated that if a man drank beer in large quantities it took him 21.7 years to kill himself, which period the whisky-drinker shortened to 16.1 years. Closer study and wider knowledge have materially changed these conclusions, to the great detriment of beer. For once, and upon one point, the physicians of the world have agreed. American, English, and German doctors say with one voice that the most {22} hopeless patient who comes into their hands is the soaked, crapulous, beer-drinker. “Point out a gray-haired beer-drinker,” they challenge, and challenge in vain. Gray-haired whisky-drinkers may be found, but not the others. Starch in every stage of decay, carried by the all-penetrating alcohol, surcharges the tissues with putrefaction, and makes the tumid veins a forcing-ground for bacteria. Thus the beer-drinker’s slight cold becomes at once pneumonia, or inflammatory rheumatism, or Bright’s disease, and his life flickers out like a candle in a gusty passage. Intemperance being among the milder vices kills slowly. Sexual sins slay {23} more rapidly, and the criminal grades of vice do their work with a swiftness in proportion to their flagrancy. The Psalmist says, “bloody and deceitful men shall not live out half their days,” but police records will show that David materially overrates the average. “One quarter their days” would approach much nearer exactness. ------ RETURNING to the major premise that the “survival of the fittest” means the selection and preservation of those individuals who are most nearly in harmony with the conditions {24} of their environment, and that the progress of the race or species involves the destruction of the weaker or the inferior who are not in such harmony, the conclusion follows that any aberration toward vice shows such discordance in the individual with the laws of his environment as marks him as inferior, weak, and obstructive of the race’s development Vice is not so much a cause as an effect--precisely as disease is a symptom. Vice does not make a nature weak or defective: a weak and defective nature expresses its weaknesses and defects in vice, and that expression brings about in one way and another {25} the sovereign remedy of extermination. ------ MUCH is said of the devastation of our fairest and brightest by the Drink Demon. This is mainly nonsense. It was more nearly true in former generations, when intemperance was an almost universal vice. As Hamlet says: