The class system permits of a simple, cheap, and practicable control, and, indeed, a control which is not confined to the brewery or to any single stage of preparation, but which follows the article over the whole country from its origin to its consumption. When alcoholic drinks are marked with their class and placed under State control, the consumers will themselves easily exercise the control. And the public will gradually become accustomed to form an opinion upon the influence of the various articles upon the working capacity and the health, not only of the individual, but also of the family and the race. State and country authorities will, with State-controlled classes, more easily see justice done on all sides. This last advantage will, naturally, only avail in those lands where the permission to sell alcoholic liquors is vested in the local authorities. The progressive class system will also give the State, the municipalities, and also private labour organisations an opportunity to support those restaurants and inns which supply nothing but pure and harmless liquors, and consumption will undergo a slow and gradual change to the lightest drinks.
At the present time the lightest kinds of beer are too heavily taxed in comparison with the heaviest kinds, and the latter in turn are too heavily taxed in comparison with brandy. From the point of view of race-hygiene, the fight must be directed especially against the fourth and most dangerous class, namely, all kinds of brandy (prohibition or Ivan Bratt's system), as well as against the mixed wines, which are so often adulterated and injurious.
Statistics from the Central Bureau for the Management of the Insane of Paris and the Department of the Seine from 1867 to 1912.
_Chief Physician to the Central Bureau, Member of the Academy of Medicine_,
From 1869 to 1912 the number of sick persons received at the Central Bureau of the St. Anne Asylum has gone on steadily increasing: occasionally signs of a falling off are noticed, quickly compensated by the number of entries for the following years.
Among these patients a great number are driven to the asylum by the abuse of alcoholic drinks. Some of these are simple alcoholics, _i.e._, those who owe their insanity entirely to excessive drinking; the others make up the numerous group of degenerates, who are for the most part descendants of alcoholics, and on whom fall all the forms of physical, intellectual, and moral degradation.