Such a conclusion can be abundantly justified by an
appeal to the history of the Teutonic nations, the nations around the
Mediterranean, the Jews, or any race which has been submitted to the
test.
There seems hardly room for dispute on the reality of this phase of
natural selection. But there is another way in which the process of
strengthening the race against the attraction and effect of alcohol may
be going on at the same time. If the drug does actually injure the
germ-plasm, and set up a deterioriation, it is obvious that natural
selection is given another point at which to work. The more deteriorated
would be eliminated in each generation in competition with the less
deteriorated or normal; and the process of racial purification would
then go on the more rapidly. The fact that races long submitted to the
action of alcohol have become relatively resistant to it, therefore,
does not in itself answer the question of whether alcohol injures the
human germ-plasm.
The possible racial effect of alcoholization is, in short, a much more
complicated problem than it appears at first sight to be. It involves
the action of natural selection in several important ways, and this
action might easily mask the direct action of alcohol on the germ-plasm,
if there be any measurable direct result.
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