CHAPTER V.

INJURY TO PUBLIC HEALTH.

"Health is the capital of the laboring man."-LATHAM. "In as far as human life is more important than all financial interests, and even in the financial view, the creative power of human force is more valuable than all created capital, this cardinal interest of the people, individually and collectively, should take precedence of all other provisions in all legislation. Every law, grant, or privilege from the Legislature should have this invariable condition: That human health, strength, or comfort should, in no manner or degree, be impaired or vitiated thereby.”—Dr. Edward Jarvis.

THAT the use of intoxicating liquors to such an extent as to produce drunkenness is a cause of disease and death, is too obvious and universally admitted to allow of argument. Of course, if it shortens life it renders health less perfect while life lasts. But perhaps few who assent to these general propositions have an adequate idea of the aggregate loss of vitality from this cause. We have now at hand instructive observations in this matter, taken by competent persons not in the interest of any theory, but of business and to regulate the operations of Life Insurance Companies.

In the Twenty-third Registration Report of

Massachusetts (pages 61, et seq.) will be found instructive tables, selected and digested by Dr. Edward Jarvis, from the result of the investigations of Mr. Neison, Actuary of the Medical, Invalid, and General Life Insurance Company of London. It is necessary to premise, in order to appreciate the full force of the tables, that under the designation "General Population" are of course included both the temperate and the intemperate; and that the latter designation includes "only such as were decidedly addicted to drinking habits, and not merely occasional drinkers or free livers."

The same general result is displayed in several ways, thus:

COMPARATIVE DEATH RATE AT DIFFERENT AGES.

If the death rate of the general population be constantly represented by 10, for purposes of comparison, then the death rate among the intemperate between the ages of 15 and 20 would be represented by 18; between 20 and 30, by

51; between 30 and 40, by 42; between 40 and 50, by 41; between 50 and 60, by 29, and

so on.

SURVIVAL AT SUCCESSIVE AGES.

If we take 100,000 intemperate persons and 100,000 of the general population, starting at the age of twenty years, we shall find there will be living at successive periods as follows:

66
AS TO CAREFUL DRINKERS."

Beyond these, which deal with the results of acknowledged intemperance, the limited and yet valuable experience of a few English Life Insurance Companies who have a separate section for total abstainers, while they refuse all who are more than "careful drinkers," shows that any use of such liquors as a beverage tends

* I have given only the males. Dr. Jarvis adds the females, out the general result is substantially the same.

to shorten life. I give a single illustration. In a paper read by E. Vivian, M.A., on "Vital Statistics," before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at its annual meeting in 1875, he exhibited the following as the result of statistics kept by the “United Kingdom and General Provident Institution" of two classes of persons insured-one total abstainers and the other not:

RATE OF MORTALITY DURING THE LAST NINE YEARS, ENDING 30TH DECEMBER, 1874.

In the Total Abstinence Section:

Expected deaths,
Actual deaths,

549

411

138

Or one per cent. below the average.

It gives the impressive emphasis of statistical demonstration to the late weighty utterance of Sir H. Thompson, a practitioner of European reputation, in his letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, in which he says:

"I have long had the conviction that there is no greater cause of evil, moral and physical, in this country than the use of alcoholic beverages. I do not

mean by this that extreme indulgence which produces drunkenness. The habitual use of fermented liquors to an extent far short of what is necessary to produce that condition, and such as is quite common in all ranks of society, injures the body and diminishes the mental power to an extent which, I think, few people are aware of. Such, at all events, is the result of observation during more than twenty years of professional life, devoted to hospital practice, and to private practice in every rank above it. Thus I have no hesitation in attributing a very large proportion of some of the most painful and dangerous maladies which come under my notice, as well as those which every medical man has to treat, to the ordinary and daily use of fermented drink taken in the quantity which is conventionally deemed moderate."

THE NIDUS OF DISEASE.

When the census gives us the deaths by drunkenness, it not only frames its reports from the indulgent verdicts of surviving friends, but what is more necessary to observe, it leaves out of view the indirect, but vastly more important, influence of intemperance as the preparation for, and ally of almost every disease that flesh is heir to.

In considering the relation of alcohol to the public health, we are not to confine ourselves to its effect upon its immediate victims, but to look at its effect upon the sanitary condition of community and its tendency to produce a prop