"(8) The frequency of diseases of the eye and eyelids, which might well
be attributed to parental neglect, was found to have little, if any,
relation to parental alcoholism.
"To sum up, then no _marked_ relation has been found between the
intelligence, physique or disease of the offspring and the parental
alcoholism in any of the categories mentioned. On the whole the balance
turns as often in favor of the alcoholic as of the non-alcoholic
parentage. It is needless to say that we do not attribute this to the
alcohol but to certain physical and possibly mental characters which
appear to be associated with the tendency to alcohol."
Of the many criticisms made of this work, most are irrelevant to our
present purpose, or have been satisfactorily met by the authors. It must
be said, however, that as the children examined were all school
children, the really degenerate offspring of alcoholics, if any such
existed, would not have been found, because they would not have been
admitted to the school. Further, it is not definitely known whether the
parents' alcoholism dated from before or after the birth of the child
examined. Then, the report did not exactly compare the offspring of
drinkers and non-drinkers, but classified the parents as those who
drank, and those who were sober; the latter were not, for the most part,
teetotalers, but merely persons whose use of alcohol was so moderate
that it exercised no visible bad influence on the health of the
individual or the welfare of the home.
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