vely high
death-rate among those who find it too attractive, and the average of
the race therefore is certain to become stronger in this respect with
each generation. Such a conclusion can be abundantly justified by an
appeal to the history of the Teutonic nations, the nations around the
Mediterranean, the Jews, or any race which has been submitted to the
test.

There seems hardly room for dispute on the reality of this phase of
natural selection. But there is another way in which the process of
strengthening the race against the attraction and effect of alcohol may
be going on at the same time. If the drug does actually injure the
germ-plasm, and set up a deterioriation, it is obvious that natural
selection is given another point at which to work. The more deteriorated
would be eliminated in each generation in competition with the less
deteriorated or normal; and the process of racial purification would
then go on the more rapidly. The fact that races long submitted to the
action of alcohol have become relatively resistant to it, therefore,
does not in itself answer the question of whether alcohol injures the
human germ-plasm.

The possible racial effect of alcoholization is, in short, a much more
complicated problem than it appears at first sight to be. It involves
the action of natural selection in several important ways, and this
action might easily mask the direct action of alcohol on the germ-plasm,
if there be any measurable direct result.

No longer content with a long perspective historical view, we will
scrutinize the direct investigations of the problem which have been made
during recent years. These investigations have in many cases been
widely advertised to the public, and their conclusions have been so much
repeated that they are often taken at their face value, without critical
examination.

It must be borne in mind that the solution of the problem depends on
finding evidence of degeneracy or impairment in the offspring of persons
who have used alcohol, and that this relation might be explainable in
one or more of three ways:

(1) It may be that alcoholism is merely a symptom of a degenerate stock.
In this case the children will be defective, not because their parents
drank, but because their parents were defective--the parents' drinking
being merely one of the symptoms of their defect.

(2) It may be that alcohol directly poisons the germ-plasm, in such a
way that parents of sound stock, who drin