The story of my life ; or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years / by Mary A. Livermore ... with hitherto unrecorded incidents and recollections of three years' experience as an army nurse in the great Civil War, and reminiscences of twenty-five years' experiences on the lecture platform ... to which is added six of her most popular lectures ... with portraits and one hundred and twenty engravings from designs by eminent artists ...

702

702 DOES THE LIQUOR TRAFFIC PAY?1

and pass ouit of life. Science tells us that a drunken parent
transmits to his posterity a tendency to the had, that will
niot spend itself until after the fourth generation, so that the
(lrunken father reaches out a hand from beyond the grave,
arnd weighs down his posterity with unfortunate tendencies
for four generations. If now the children of drunken parents themselves become drunkards, the curse to posterity is
pushed one generation farther, and it is in this way that the
woe and brutishness of the race has been perpetuated.
The liquor traffic costs us more than this. At one time
during the life of Dr Samuel G Howe, he was asked how
many of the imbecile children in the institution at South
Boston were the offspring of drunken parents. He immediately instituted proceedings for ascertaining, and found
that one hundred and forty-five of every three hundred children in the institution were of drunken parentage. Those
are the figures for only one institution. When we rem ember that there are ninety-six thousand imbecile and feebleminded persons in the United States, - less than five thousand of whom are in institutions, - we can gain a faint idea
of the horrors created by intemperance, which are increasing daily, since ninety thousand of these are propagating
their kind at large. The waves of intemperance break on a
boundless shore in this direction.
The State of Massachusetts at one time maintained an
institution at Monson, Massachusetts, for the little children
that had come under its control and care, through the
crime, death, or intemperance of parents. It was called the
"11State Primary School." Once I made a visit to the school
when there were nearly six hundred children in its care. It