(d) The chances of losing children at chances of begetting feeble-minded or degenerate children, are markedly greater for even moderate drinkers than for abstainers.  Children of total abstainers have a great advantage, on the average, in size, stature, bodily vigor, intellectual power; they stand, on the average, between a year and two years ahead in class of the children of moderate drinkers, they have less than half as many eye, ear, and other physical defects.  This proved influence of even light drinking upon the vitality and normality transmitted to children should be the most serious of indictments against self-indulgence.  Truly the sins of the fathers are visited upon the second and third generation. [Footnote:  See Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, vol.  IX, p. 234; H. S. Williams, op. cit, pp. 44-47.]

(2) The economic waste is enormous: 

(a) Nearly, if not quite, two billion dollars a year are spent by the people of the United States for intoxicating beverages.  Between fifty and seventy-five million bushels of grain are consumed annually in their production, besides the grapes used for wines.  Nor does the money spent for liquors go in any appreciable degree into the pockets of the farmers who raise the grains; less than a thirtieth part finds its way to them, the brewers, distillers, and retailers getting about two thirds.  The money invested in the beer industry alone was in 1909 over $550,000,000. [Footnote:  See Independent, vol. 67, p. 1326; Year-Books of the Anti-Saloon League.  For this whole subject of the cost of the liquor trade, see chap.  V, in H. S. Warner, op. cit, and the bibliography appended.] The importance of the national liquor bill can be realized by a simple computation; it would suffice to pay two million men three dollars a day, six days in the week, year in and year out; it would suffice to build four or five Panama Canals (at $400,000,000) a year.  When we reckon up the total liquor bill of the world, a sum many times this, we can see what a frightful waste of man’s resources is going on; for not only is there no a tremendous additional drain of wealth caused indirectly thereby.

(b) Among the factors in this additional drain of wealth, which must be added to the figures given above in estimating the total financial loss to the community, are:  the loss in efficiency of workers through the- usually unrealized- toxic effects of alcohol; the loss of the lives of adult workers due to alcoholic poisoning-an annual loss greater than that of the whole Civil War; the support by the State of paupers, two fifths of whom, it is estimated, owe their status to alcoholism; [Footnote:  See H. S. Williams, op. cit, p. 85] the support by the State of the insane, from a quarter to a half of whom owe their insanity directly or indirectly to alcohol; [Footnote:  Ibid, p. 63] the support of destitute and deserted children; [Footnote:  Ibid, p. 89 ] the maintenance of prisons, of courts, and police — the Massachusetts