Quite distinct from the foregoing there is the influence of alcohol upon mothers and motherhood that would otherwise have been healthy. Alcohol, like lead, as has been shown elsewhere, may injure the racial elements in the mother before even expectant motherhood occurs. Later, it may prejudice both expectant motherhood and nursing motherhood; further it is often the primary cause of over-laying and of chronic cruelty and neglect. Until quite lately there was also the action of the public-house upon the children to be reckoned with, where the mother visited it and was allowed to take them with her. That, however, has been at last put a stop to in England, following the example of civilization elsewhere.
But it will be clear that the problem is a complicated one. It has been confidently attacked by Professor Karl Pearson in a Report upon "the influence of parental alcoholism upon the offspring," and the conclusions of that Report have been widely circulated and are being circulated almost wherever the monetary interest of alcohol has power. Briefly, Professor Pearson came to the conclusion that the children of drunken parents are, on the average, superior to those of sober parents in physique and in intelligence, in sight and in freedom from epilepsy and other diseases. This, of course, as everybody knows, is obvious nonsense, and the only problem remaining is how to account for its assertion. I have dealt with that question at length elsewhere,[24] and here need only note in a word that Professor Pearson's Report includes no comparison between the children of abstainers and drinkers, since the number of abstainers was too few to be treated separately; that Professor Pearson attaches no strict meaning to the term alcoholism, by which he means anything from what the word really means down to a general suspicion that the parents were drinking more than was good for themselves or their home; and finally that in studying the influence of alcohol upon offspring Professor Pearson has omitted to enquire in a single case whether the alcoholism or the offspring came first. The Report has no scientific basis whatever and has been riddled with criticism by expert students of every kind, including not merely students of alcoholism but also Professor Alfred Marshall of Cambridge, the greatest English-speaking economist of the time, who has shown that there are no grounds for the assumptions made by Professor Pearson in that part of his argument which is based upon the economic efficiency of drinking and non-drinking parents. The publication of this Report merely hastens the rapid decadence of "biometry," the foundations of which have already been sapped by the re-discovery of Mendelism in 1900; but it was necessary to refer to the matter here, since in the advertisements and the other printed matter paid for by the alcoholic party, the public is being informed that the children of alcoholic parents have been proved to be, on the whole, superior to those of non-alcoholic parents. This question has been exhaustively studied, yet again, in London by Dr. Sullivan, in Helsingfors by Professor Laitinen, and also in New York in an enquiry which actually embraced no less than fifty-five thousand school children. The elementary fallacies entertained by Professor 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 in a great city such as London or Leeds. As everyone should know, there is a huge disparity between the figures in the two cases, and in some records it has been found that under equal conditions two Gentile babies will die for each Jewish baby. The conditions are of course not equal, because the Jewish babies have Jewish motherhood, splendidly backed up as it usually is by Jewish fatherhood; whereas the Gentile babies have a very inferior parental care. Now if it were that infant mortality, as most people suppose, simply meant the death of a certain number of babies, the foregoing facts would have no particular bearing upon the questions of racial survival, except in so far as those questions depend upon mere numbers. But the advocates of the great campaign against infant mortality have always maintained that the actual mortality is only one effect of the causes which produce it. When people have said that the loss of a certain number of babies mattered little, we have always replied that for every baby killed many were damaged. This contention has now been proved up to the hilt in the remarkable official enquiry, the first of its kind, made by Dr. Newsholme, now Chief Medical Officer of the Local Government Board.[26] He studied infant mortality in relation to the mortality of children and young people at all subsequent ages, and he proved, once and for all, that infant mortality is what we have always maintained it to be, not merely a disaster in itself but an evidence of causes which injure the health and vigour of the survivors at all ages. Wherever infant mortality is highest, there child mortality is highest, and the mortality of boys and girls at puberty and during the early years of adolescence when the body is preparing for and becoming capable of parenthood. The evil conditions that cause infant mortality are thus proved to be far-reaching and much wider in their effects than any but the students of the subject have yet realized.
This chapter must be brought to a close, but it may be added that the emergence of sober nations, such as Japan and Turkey, into contemporary history, and the possibilities latent in China,—to mention none other of the "dying nations," so very much alive, at whom glass-eyed politicians used to sneer—constitutes one of the major facts of contemporary history. No one can yet say whether these nations will have the wisdom to retain their ancient habits or whether they will accept our whisky along with our parliamentary institutions and motor-cars. Much future history rests upon this issue.
But I have little doubt that whatever happens in the case of Japan and Turkey, Jewish parenthood will retain the quality which has long ago become fixed as a racial characteristic, and that the race which has survived so much oppression and so many of its oppressors will survive contemporary abuse and the abusers. Its women nurse their own babies and have retained the power to do so. Neither before birth nor after do they feed the life that is to be on alcohol; they lay rightly the foundations of the future, where alone those foundations can be durably laid. The reader is not necessarily asked to admire them or to like them or to speak well of them, but if he desires the strength and continuance of whatever race or nation he belongs to, he will do well to imitate them.
It seems necessary to believe in the yellow peril, though not, of course, in its absurd form of a military nightmare. The pressure of population is the irresistible force of history. It depends, of course, upon parenthood, and more especially upon motherhood and therefore upon womanhood. At present the motherhood of the yellow races is sober. If it remains so, and if the motherhood of Western races takes the course which motherhood has taken for many years past in England, it is very sure that in the Armageddon of the future, those ancient races, Semitic and Mongol, which had achieved civilization when Europe was in the Stone Age, will be in a position of immense advantage as against our own race, which is threatening, at any rate in England, to follow the example of many races of which little record, or none, now remains, and drink itself to death.