“ Cold alone may produce such peculiar effects that Captain Parry said in his Journal, “I cannot help thinking that many a man may have been punished for intoxication who was only suffering from the benumbing effects of frost; for I have more than once seen our people in a state so exactly resembling that of the most stupid intoxication, that I should certainly have charged them with the offence had I not been quite sure that no possible means were afforded them on Melville Island to procure anything stronger than snow water.” ”

“ Analysis of the prosecutions for drunkenness shows that about 24% of the total number of offences are committed by women. In the larger towns the proportion, as a rule, is higher. In London, 38% of the drunkenness is attributable to women; in Manchester, 36%; in Belfast and Glasgow, 32%. In Liverpool, on the other hand, the proportion is only 24%. The much-controverted question as to whether intemperance is increasing among women can hardly, however, be decided by an appeal to the criminal statistics. ”

“ The effects of intoxicants are variously modified by the temperament of the individual and the nature of the inebriant. When that is alcohol, its action on an average individual is first to fill him with a serene and perfect self-complacency. ”

“ Some individuals have, moreover, a special idiosyncrasy or susceptibility to alcohol, due to heredity or to one of the sequelae of sunstroke or cranial injury. The children of drunkards are usually very susceptible to the poison, becoming intoxicated by a far smaller quantity than is needed by a normal person. ”

“ It has even been contended, with much show of learned authority, that since drunkenness leads to disease and early death, the proneness to strong drink in the long run causes the elimination of the unfit, and results in a general sobering of the community, a race being therefore temperate in proportion to its past sufferings through alcohol. ”

“ DRUNKENNESS, a term signifying generally a state resulting from excessive drinking, and usually associated with alcoholic intoxication, or alcohol poisoning. It may represent either an act or a habit, the latter consisting in frequent repetitions of the former. As an act it may be an accident, most usually arising from the incautious use of one or other of the commonly employed intoxicating agents ”

“ In short, from tea to haschisch we have, through hops, alcohol, tobacco and opium, a sort of graduated scale of intoxicants, which stimulate in small doses and narcotize in larger,—the narcotic dose having no stimulating properties whatever, and only appearing to possess them from the fact that the agent can only be gradually taken up by the blood, and the system thus comes primarily under the influence of a stimulant dose. ”

“ Averages based upon the returns of entire counties do not, however, afford a complete guide to the distribution of drunkenness, inasmuch as offences are not equally distributed over the whole area of a county. A heavy ratio of drunkenness in a small district may often give a county an unfavourable position in the general averages, notwithstanding favourable conditions in the rest of its area. ”

“ But even these centres are not unaffected; the paralysis of these as of the other sections of the cerebro-spinal system varies in its incompleteness, and at times becomes complete, the coma of drunkenness terminating in death. More usually the intoxicant is gradually eliminated, and the individual restored to consciousness, a consciousness disturbed by the secondary results of the agent he has abused, which vary with the nature of that agent. Whether, however, directly or indirectly through the nervous system, the stomach suffers in every case ”

“ If, instead of taking the total number of deaths, we take the ratio per million persons living, the increase is seen even more clearly:—
It appears that, while the ratio of mortality from alcoholic excess increased 87% among males during the last two decades of the century, among females it increased by no less than 180%. ”

“ Various modern biologists have discussed, with more or less acceptance in certain circles, the historical conditions in various races and in different countries as to the use and abuse of intoxicants, and have drawn varying conclusions from their theories. ”