OR LIKE THIS?
There is one great evil that for hundreds and hundreds of years has been known wherever people are crowded together, and even in the open country, too; and which has been the cause of more untidiness and uncleanliness and unhappiness and disease than any other evil ever known. And that is the drinking of alcohol. People don’t drink clear alcohol, but they can get a great deal of it—enough to poison them badly—in the fermented drinks you learned about some time ago.
In the days when your grandfather was a little boy, every man thought that ale and wine and whiskey were good foods for him when he was well; and good medicine when he was sick. He believed that they gave him an appetite, and increased his strength. But now we have found, by carefully studying the effects of alcohol, in laboratories and in hospitals, that these beliefs were almost entirely mistaken. We know that all that wine, beer, and whiskey do is to make people feel better for a little while, without making them actually stronger or better in any way. In fact, in most respects these drinks make them weaker and worse instead.
Perhaps you will ask, “How do whiskey and wine and beer do us harm?” And here is only part of the answer: (1) They tire the heart and, by enlarging the blood pipes in the skin, make the heart pump too much of the blood out to the skin. In this way they make a person feel warmer when he really is not any warmer. (2) They make the liver work too hard. (3) They dull the brain, so that it cannot think so clearly or so well. (4) If one drinks them frequently, it is harder for him to get well when he is sick; more people die out of those who drink alcohol than out of those who do not.
Alcohol is a narcotic; that is, it deadens our nerves, for the time being, to any sensations of pain or discomfort, much in the same way that a very small dose of morphine or opium would. We may imagine it does us good because, for a little while after drinking it, we may cease to feel pain or fatigue or cold; but, instead of making us really better and able to do more work, it is dulling our nerves so that we work more slowly and more clumsily. Men who have carefully measured the amount of work that they do have found that they do less work on days when they take one or two glasses of beer or wine than they do on days when they drink only water.
The great insurance companies have found that those of their policy holders who drink no alcohol at all live nearly one fourth longer and have nearly one third fewer sicknesses than those who drink alcohol even in moderate amounts.
Indeed, so strong is the evidence as to the bad effects of alcohol, and so steadily is it increasing, that it will probably not be very many years more before the drinking of wine or beer by intelligent, thoughtful people will have become less than half as common as it is now.
Strong, healthy men may be able for a long time to drink small amounts of liquor without noticing any harmful effects; but all the time the alcohol may be doing serious harm to their nerves and brain and kidneys and liver and blood vessels, which they will not find out until it is too late to stop the trouble.
Useless and bad as alcohol is for full-grown men and women, it is even worse for young and growing children; and no child, and no boy or girl under the age of twenty-one, should ever touch a drop of it, except in those rare instances where it may be prescribed as a medicine by a doctor, just as many other drugs are, which in larger doses would be poisons.
Fortunately, it will be no trouble for you children to let it alone entirely; for not one of you would like the taste of it the first time—or, indeed, for the matter of that, for the first ten or twelve times—that you tried to drink it, if you should be so foolish. This is one striking difference between alcohol and all other foods and drinks. Children have absolutely no natural liking, or taste, for the drinks that contain it, as they have for meat, milk, sugar, apples, and the other real foods. This is Nature’s way of telling them that it is not a real food, and not needed in any way for their growth and health. Let it alone absolutely, until you are at least twenty-one years old; and by that time you will probably have become so convinced of the harm that it is doing that you will never begin using it at all.