ofessor
Pearson were of course avoided and the uniform result in these and in a
host of other enquiries that might be named is the only result which
could be imagined in a universe where causes have effects.

The particular causes under consideration have been having their effects
for a very long time. It begins to be more and more clear that they have
played a great part in the history of mankind. As the "history" we
learnt at school is more and more discredited, there is slowly coming
into being a real kind of history which deals with the essentials of
national life and death, and is based upon the principles of organic
evolution. This is a thesis which one has attempted to justify in a
previous book, but one aspect of it must be recurred to here. Our modern
study of various diseases and poisons is throwing a light on the life of
nations. Take for instance the modern theories as to the influence of
malarial poison upon Greece. In the case of alcohol, we now have
evidence which is real and unchallengeable. The properties which it
displays when we study it to-day have always been and always will be its
properties. We find that it has certain actions on living protoplasm in
the twentieth century; we know enough of the uniformity of nature to
realize that it had those actions in the tenth century, and will have
them in the thirtieth. As we study under the microscope the influence of
alcohol upon the racial tissues in the individual,[25] and therein find
confirmation of experimental study and observation by all the other
means available to science, we begin to see that the greatest facts of
history are those of which historians have no word, and not least
amongst these has ever been the influence of alcohol upon parenthood. It
is possible to adduce arguments in favour of the view that the
practically complete immunity of their parenthood from alcohol is one of
the great factors that explain the all but unexampled persistence of
the Jews and their present status in the van of the world's thought and
work. For history it is the parents that matter as against the
non-parents, and of the parents it is the mothers even more than the
fathers. The freedom of the Jews as a whole from alcoholism is more
marked than ever in the case of their women; that is to say, in the case
of their mothers.

We see the part-results of this in our own time when we compare the
infant mortality amongst the Jews with that of their Gentile neighbours