INTRODUCTION OF PRESIDENT YOUNG JOSIAH L. PICKARD, CUPERTINO, CAL. Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: As I have looked out upon this vast audience, my thoughts have flitted back and forth over a period of fifty-three years of my connection with this Association, back to a small room in Cincinnati which sufficed for the few gathered for deliberation upon the education of a nation, at the first regular Annual Convention of this Association. Not one do I meet here today. "O for the touch of a vanished hand, Here, in one of God's first temples, whose inclosing walls are high mountains and a vast ocean, and whose roof is the blue vault of heaven, are gathered thousands of worshipers. The occasion bids me think of the city which is today honored for the fifth time by the call of its superintendent of schools to the presidency of this National Association and this time, the first in its history, a woman -a woman who at the beginning of her career took for her motto: "Life attains its highest eminence not by sitting idle upon past achievements but by steadily pressing onward and upward." Beginning her work as a teacher in the city where she found salary attached to position and not to person, she enters the line for promotion in position opened to all without distinction of sex and to be filled on the basis of merit. She devotes her evenings to study, that she may be fitted to any position open to her desire. Step by step she advances with both men and women at her side, until the last step but one is reached-that of superintendent of a district -where she is one of ten equally divided as to sex. Here in her work she finds a disposition on the part of those in authority to require the placing of a hobble-skirt upon her freedom to do what she feels best for the schools under her charge. So she steps out of the line of promotion into a professorship in the University of Chicago, whose diploma she bears and from which she received the honor of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, which she had earned by her long-continued course of study. Not long does she remain in this position but is called to the presidency of the city Normal Teachers College. Now she returns to the chosen line of promotion and by advice of friends becomes a candidate for the superintendency of the Chicago city schools. Winning over a number of men of prominence, she today is the leader of a body of six thousand teachers, many of whom have been under her instruction and nearly all under her influence. Luck -do I hear? No, my friends-luck is a headless word and offensive. Pluck is emblazoned on her banner and with pluck in her heart, ignoring privilege and conquering disability, she has won in her career entirely within the limits of a single city. And now it is to me an occasion of peculiar pleasure that I meet one whose work it was my privilege to observe for thirteen years and speak with her of the city whose destruction and rebuilding we both witnessed; and it is with enhanced pleasure that we meet in a sister city of like experience. Purified by fire, your city has risen into newness of life thru her indomitable energy-why waste breath upon long words, when a single syllable suffices-thru the pluck of her men and women. Members of the National Education Association, it is with pardonable pride that I introduce to you as your president one who has won honor in every station she has held, DOCTOR ELLA FLAGG YOUNG, and now, Mr. Chairman, she awaits at your hands the crown of national honor. PAPERS AND DISCUSSIONS TEMPERANCE AND SOCIETY DAVID STARR JORDAN, PRESIDENT, LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY, STANFORD UNIVERSITY, CAL. We may look at the alcohol question from three different points of view -its physiological effects on the human body, the effect of its public sale, dilute or concentrated, on society, and its effect on the character and purpose of the individual man. Alcohol is a substance or drug produced in the disintegration of sugar by certain minute plants or ferments. In wines or malt liquors, the amount of alcohol is relatively small, mostly from 3 to 10 per cent. In distilled liquors there may be from 40 to 80 per cent of alcohol. Whether dilute or concentrated, alcohol has the same general effects, the degrees dependent mainly on the amount of the substance absorbed into the system. The general action of alcohol is that of a nerve-depressant. It appears as a stimulant only because its first effect in lowering nerve-action is to dissolve those restraints and reserves which we naturally build up in our experience in life. The formation of the restraints and reserves is known as character-building. To throw off restraint gives an appearance of stimulation, because it releases the lower tendencies otherwise held in check. A man under the influence of liquor may utter his most profound secrets. To do this freely is not an evidence of intellectual strength or of mental activity. To cut off the head of a chicken will in the same fashion impel the bird to violent motor activity. But we do not call the process a "stimulant," for the activity thus produced is temporary and to no purpose. The effect of alcohol as a depressant is the same in kind, whether the quantity taken be large or small. The difference between the glow of a glass of claret and the stupor of a whiskey debauch is mainly one of degree. Alcohol again has a specific effect on the nervous system as a disturber of accuracy. In this lies the joy of wine such as it is. It has a certain power "to drive dull care away," to erase "from the sad calendar unborn tomorrow and dead yesterday." It has the power of causing the nervous system to lie, to make one feel warm when he is cold, to make one feel good when he is not good, and by the same whim to bring about "a difference in the morning," a dark-brown taste, a subjective wretchedness which is as unreal as the supposed joy which it inevitably follows. The nervous system once taught to lie fails afterward to record the truth. This failure affects the three great mental processes alike-sensation, comparison, and movement: observation, thought, and action. It makes its victim uncertain as to what he sees or feels, hazy as to the meaning of his sensations, and shaky when he carries his feeling or thought into action. Repeated saturation of the nervous system makes these difficulties chronic, and the fact is recorded by the fall of the victim in the respect of others. With this goes the more important loss of his own self-respect. The evil in this case is not primarily drunkenness, but nervous deterioration. Drunkenness is a spasm of the nervous system. In a sense, it is an effort of nature to throw off the evil. When alcohol ceases to make a man drunk, he is in a pretty bad way. He has lost his sensitiveness and is as little a normal man as if he were insensible to a hot iron or to contact with an icicle. This is the fallacy inherent in the claim that the wine-drinking countries are the models of temperance. The daily semi-saturation of the Italian laborer may be just as unwholesome as the occasional sprees of the Scottish farmer. The latter may be more unpleasant when in his cups, but he may likewise be more normal in the longer intervals between them. The statistics of Jean de Bloch show a higher percentage of deaths from alcoholism in France than in England, tho England would doubtless show a larger visible percentage of drunkenness. Besides, it is the countries of moderate drinking in which there is the greatest consumption of absinthe, and other alcoholic poisons, in which the drug appears in its most virulent form. The truth is that while dilute alcohol is less harmful than alcohol not diluted, there is no amount of alcohol that has not its evil effect on the nerve-structures of the body and therefore on the veracity of life. It is, moreover, a feature of the alcohol habit that it tends to grow with indulgence. The inebriate begins as a moderate drinker, tho in most cases the moderate drinker does not become an inebriate. But every man who treats his nerves to alcohol suffers from the experience in greater or less degree. It is doubtless true that many alcoholic drinks, notably whiskies, have been recklessly adulterated or that they may contain fusil oil or other poisonous volatile oils besides alcohol. But chemists who have analyzed these beverages say that none of these poisons are more virulent than the alcohol itself. The great pharmacologist of London, Dr. Cushny, tells us that if alcohol were a new discovery, a synthetic drug from some German laboratory, its use in any form would be prohibited by law, as has been the case with the much more valuable drug cocaine. Besides its effect on the brain and nervous system, on the mind, sensation and motion, the functions of this system, we have alcohol as a general disturber of the processes of the body. Most of these are modified somewhat, always for the worse, but the burdens on the kidneys, the liver, and the arteries may be especially noted. The worn-out kidney appears as Bright's disease, the disintegrated liver as cirrhosis, and the stiffened arteries as sclerosis, which means premature old age. Quite as important is the effect recently emphasized by Dr. Metschnikoff on the phagocytes of the blood. The phagocytes, or germdestroying corpuscles, in the blood constitute our chief protection against infectious diseases. The little plants which produce typhoid fever, tuberculosis, pneumonia, blood-poisoning may find their way into the blood, to be devoured by the phagocytes, leaving us no record of their existence. By alcohol these minute creatures are themselves destroyed, and the drinker, even in the most gentlemanly moderation, is more likely to fall before a bacterial infection than is a total abstainer. And with all this, the abstainer has the advantage of knowing that his pleasures are real, his joy strengthens his body and spirit and makes way for more happiness. For this is the test by which happiness is known. False pleasures, having their source in drugs, joys which burn, also burn out, destroying the future possibility of joy. It was a poet once convivial who gave us the story of the City of Dreadful Night, and of the "time that crawleth like a monstrous snake, wounded and slow and very venomous." In an attack on alcohol as a beverage, it is now the physician and the physiologist who take the lead. It is admitted that a small amount of alcohol may be decomposed or digested by the gastric juice. To this degree and to this degree only, alcohol is a food. But all taken in excess of this food value is of the nature of poison. Whether alcohol is always a poison depends on your definition of poison. Any poison may be taken safely in quantities so small that the tissues can resist it. Strychnine, in minute quantities, is largely used as "tonic." In fact, most so-called tonics consist of atoms of poison used to stimulate motor activity. If strychnine is always a poison, then alcohol is also. If strychnine tonics are excepted from this definition, we may except dilute alcohol in small quantities, by the same process of reasoning. If the use of alcohol were a personal matter, its effects beginning and ending with the individual, the plea of personal liberty might be effective in letting each man decide on his own relation to it. But the sale of alcohol has its public relations. If the operations of an inebriate or even those of a moderate drinker are so conducted as to endanger others, the whole matter becomes a concern of the public. A drunken man is everywhere a social nuisance. Under most circumstances he is a source of bodily danger to his family and to the public at large. In all lands drinking-places are sources of danger. They lead children to drink. They make drunkards. They are the potent direct cause of the spread of poverty, crime, disease, feeblemindedness, and insanity. This is true of such places the world over-the wine-rooms of Italy, Spain, and France as well as of the vodka-shops of Russia, the rum-holes of London, or the dives of New York. It was true of the state-regulated, orderly centers of evil under the respectable, Goteborg system of Sweden, as well as of the lidless resorts of the region "somewhere East of Suez, where the best is like the worst." Thus far, nobody has devised a permanently decent method of selling alcohol as a beverage. The German Biergarten perhaps comes the nearest to this orderly ideal; but the Biergarten is recognized as the source of ruin of thousands of young men and the temperance question is becoming as acute in some of the universities of Germany as it ought to be in those of the United States. The wine-shops of southern Europe do not improve on acquaintance, and the dignified officialism of the Swedish system is failing because drink makes drunkards however honestly the process may be carried on. There is plenty of exaggerated statement on both sides, so far as the influence of the lighter alcoholics is concerned. I believe that the weight of testimony is against them all, and the man who avoids them certainly does not feel that he has missed anything of value; but many good men-many of the best of men-take a contrary view, and this is not the primary question at issue. "The fact that a glass of beer heightens the pleasure of eating constitutes a most important point in its favor." I do not myself find it so, but I fully admit this argument as one of value, and I admit also that its value is one each man must settle for himself. I repudiate wholly the idea that unless our emotions are artificially pumped up by alcohol they will be subject to atrophy. In the normal man, emotions should depend on adequate objective causes. Subjective emotions wear out the nervous system. In the words of Annie Payson Call, "Sham emotions torture, whether they be of love, religion, or liquor." A sham emotion, or subjective emotion, is one cherished for its own sake, with no purpose that it shall ever be translated into action. It is soberly claimed that the opium traffic is necessary for the welfare of China. Without his pipe-dream, the average Chinaman would never know joy. But it is never well for any man to think that he is having a |