Lager-Beer and Longevity.
HERE are two testimonies respecting the influence of lager-beer drinking on longevity. The first is from the Northwestern Life Insurance Company of Milwaukee, Wis. This company has decided that it can no longer grant a life-insurance policy to a lager-beer brewer or to any one employed in a brewery, no matter whether he be ostensibly a temperance man or not. The reason they give is, "You can never get a good glass of fresh water to drink around a brewery; and our statistics show that our business has been injured by the shortened lives of those men who drink lager-beer." The second is from the president of the Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company. He says:— "In one of our largest cities, containing a great population of beer-drinkers, I had occasion to note the deaths among a large group of persons whose habits, in their own eyes and in those of their friends and physicians, were temperate; but they were habitual users of beer. When the observation began, they were, upon the average, something under middle age, and they were, of course, select lives. For two or three years there was nothing very remarkable to be noted among this group. Presently death began to strike it, and until it had dwindled to a fraction of its original proportions, the mortality in it was astounding in extent, and still more remarkable in the manifest identity of cause and mode. There was no mistaking it; the history was almost invariable; robust, apparent health, full muscles, a fair outside, increasing weight, florid faces; then a touch of cold or a sniff of malaria, and instantly some acute disease, with almost invariably typhoid symptoms, was in violent action, and ten days or less ended it. It was as if the system had been kept fair outside while within it was eaten to a shell; and at the first touch of disease there was utter collapse; every fiber was poisoned and weak. And this, in its main features, varied of course in degree, has been my observation of beer-drinking everywhere. It is peculiarly deceptive at first; it is thoroughly destructive at last."