THE CHIEF ENEMY OF WOMEN
If we believe that the sexes are mutually dependent and, in the long
run, can neither be injured nor befriended apart, we shall be prepared
to expect that the chief enemy of civilized mankind is no less inimical
to women than to men. So long as it was supposed that drinking merely
injured the drinker, and so long as the drinkers were almost entirely
men, it could be argued by persons sufficiently foolish that indulgence
in alcohol was a male vice or delight which really did not concern women
at all--if men choose to drink or to smoke or to bet or to play games,
what business is that of women? It is an argument which would not appeal
to the mind of the primitive law-giver, and can be accepted by no one who
thinks to-day.
For the least effects of drink are those which are seen in the drinker.
The question of alcoholism is not one of the abuse of a good thing, here
and there injuring those who take it to excess, but is a national
question which affects the entire community, abstainers, and drinkers,
men, women and children, present and to come. No one who has seriously
studied the action of alcohol on civilization can question that it is
our chief external enemy. We must use the word external for the best of
good reasons, since we know that always and everywhere man's chief foes
are those of his own household--his own proneness to injure himself and
others. And alcohol, indeed, would not be our chief external enemy were
it not for the very fact that its malign power is chiefly exerted by a
degradation of the man within. It is a material thing and no part of our
psychological nature. So long as it is kept outside us it has the most
admirable uses, which are yearly becoming more various and important;
but, taken within, it alters the human constitution, and hereby achieves
its title as our worst enemy.
People who estimate the influence of alcohol by means of the alcoholic
death-rate or by the rate of convictions for drunkenness will not
readily accept the doctrine that alcohol is a greater enemy of women
than of men. Yet assuredly this is true. It is an axiomatic and first
principle that whatever injures one sex injures the other, and whilst
drinking on the part of women at present injures men as a whole in
comparatively small degree, the consumption of alcohol by men works
enormous injury upon women indirectly, in addition to that direct injury
which civilized women are yearly inflicting more gravely upon
themselves, at any rate in Great Britain.
Woman, we have argued, is Nature's supreme organ of the future, and just
as she is mediate between men and the future, so men are mediate between
her and the present. For the individual woman and the present, the
quality of the manhood which constitutes her human environment is more
important than anything else. If the manhood is withdrawn and she is
thrown upon her own resources, there is disaster; if the manhood be
damaged or degenerate, so much the worse for the woman; if the manhood
be of the best, there and only there are the best conditions provided
for the highest womanhood.
First, then, let us observe how alcohol injures women by its
contribution to the male death-rate. Allusion has already been made to a
simple statistical enquiry which I made a few years ago in regard to the
influence of alcohol as a maker of widows and orphans. The results of
that enquiry may here be quoted, having only appeared in the daily press
hitherto. They will suffice to show that alcohol on this ground alone is
a great enemy of women, and especially of wives. The following is the
conclusion published in several papers in England in November, 1908:--
"Some time ago we heard a good deal, both in and out of Parliament,
about the debenture widow whose little all is invested in brewery
securities. There is, on the other hand, the widow so made by
alcohol. I am not aware that anyone has attempted to estimate the
approximate number of each of these two classes. The following is
merely a rude approximation.
It has been stated that there are half a million persons who have
invested money in the licensed trade. Let us allow that half of
these are men. The death-rate of all males, above fifteen years of
age, is slightly over sixteen per 1,000. At the census of 1901, 536
in each 1,000 males aged fifteen years and upwards were found to be
married. Ignoring the differential death-rate of the married as
compared with bachelors and widows, it follows that about 4,100
male investors in the licensed trade die each year, of whom some
2,197 will be married men, leaving behind them the same number of
widows entirely or partly dependent on these investments.
The widows made by drink are nearly six times as many.
Numerous inquiries at home and abroad agree somewhat closely in
stating _14 per cent_. of the entire death-rate to be due to
alcohol. The proportion of one in seven is accepted by Dr. Archdall
Eeid, who considers that all efforts to restrain drinking increase
drunkenness. I do not think the justness of this figure can be
disputed at all, except as an under-estimate. We are here dealing
with male deaths only, and I will do my contention the obvious
injustice of supposing that the proportion of deaths due wholly or
in part to alcohol is no higher amongst men than amongst women. If
one could allow for the existing difference, the result would be
even more terrible.
Taking the figures for 1906 for England and Wales alone, we have
167,307 deaths of males over fifteen; 23,422 of these wholly or
partly due to alcohol, and of this number 12,554 were married men
(i. e., 536 per 1,000). The average size of a family in England and
Wales is 4.62, according to Whitaker. If we multiply the number of
widows, 12,554, by 3.62, we shall have an approximation to the
number of widows and orphans made by alcohol in 1906. There were
45,445, or over 124 widows and orphans made by alcohol every day in
the year.
We may now note some further data helping us to compare the 12,554
alcohol-made widows with the 2,197 whose husbands' fortunes were
wholly or in part bound up with the welfare of the licensed trade.
(Of these latter, also, of course, a large proportion would be
alcohol-made.)
Dr. Tatham's recently published letter on occupational mortality in
the three years, 1900, 1901, 1902, informs us as to twenty-one
occupations in which the alcoholic death-rate is grossly excessive.
In these twenty-one occupations selected by Dr. Tatham as having an
alcohol mortality which exceeds the standard by at least 50 per
cent., we can work out the alcohol factor and find that it amounts
to 24.5 per cent. The table would take up too much space for me to
ask you to print it, but it is ready on demand, public or private.
The figures work out to show that 5,092 married men in these
twenty-one trades died in each year from alcohol. (I have taken
24.5 per cent, of the whole number of deaths in the three years,
and reckoned the married proportion of these.)
The calculation shows that in these twenty-one occupations the
comparative alcohol mortality is 24.5 per cent., as against only 12
per cent. in all other occupations.
Amongst the occupations in Dr. Tatham's table may be noted
coalheaver, coach, cab, etc., service, groom, butcher, messenger,
tobacconist, general labourer, general shopkeeper, brewer, chimney
sweep, dock labourer, hawker, publican, inn and hotel servants. A
glance at the table will show that in most cases the men who are
dying are "industrial drinkers," who frequent public-houses in the
districts where the reduction in the number of the licenses under
the present Bill will occur. Often nowadays the widows are heavy
drinkers, and the lives of their children centre round the
public-house.
If the only wealth of a nation is its life, and history teaches no
more certain truth--and if, since individuals are mortal, the
quantity and quality of parenthood--or of childhood, according to
the point of view--are the supreme factors in the destiny of
nations, do not the foregoing figures warrant the contention that
he who at this date is for alcohol is against England?"
It has been shown that the effect of alcohol upon the brain persists for
not less than thirty hours after the last dose. But more than two years
have now passed since the foregoing was printed, leaving ample time for
any member of the alcoholic party to "pull himself together" and
demolish it. One is therefore entitled to assume that it cannot be
demolished; on the contrary, it could easily be shown that the foregoing
figures very considerably underrate the actual number of widows and
orphans who must be made by alcohol in this country every year.
All students of modern life, however greatly they differ in their
methods and objects, are agreed that the question of the economic
position of women is one of the gravest of our time. While this is so,
it may be added that only the Eugenist can adequately realize the
importance of this question, since he knows that with it is involved the
all-important matter of the selection amongst present women for the
motherhood of the future. Unfortunately, as we have seen, the modern
trend is quite definitely in the direction of those of our guides, whom
most of us follow, knowingly or unknowingly, because they have the
brains and we have not, in favouring the economic position of women at
the expense of male responsibility. Meanwhile we have the economic basis
of society as it is, and there is no more serious indictment against
alcohol than this which I have attempted to formulate against it on the
ground of its destruction of fatherhood. Whatever the rest of the
community may incline to, it assuredly seems that the wives, from palace
to hovel, ought to be enemies of this great enemy of theirs. The time
will certainly come when the woman who is bringing up children will be
placed in a position of economic security, and when indeed all other
persons will be less secure than she because the sane State of the
future will guarantee, and regard as the first charge upon itself, the
maintenance of the conditions necessary for the production of the next
generation. But in the chaos in which we welter, widows and orphans have
to take their chance. Who will say a good word for the substance which
makes them by tens of thousands in England and Wales alone every year?
At least one economic aspect of this question may, however, be dealt
with here. In a rightly constituted society people are held responsible
for their deeds. Parenthood is a deed; in a very true sense it is a more
deliberate, a more active, more self-determined deed, on the part of the
father than on the part of the mother. At present the only act for which
men are held irresponsible--for our practice amounts to that--is the act
for which, above all others, they should be held responsible. A large
amount of the money now spent by men on alcohol and tobacco, and other
things which shorten their lives, and are needed only because they
create a need for themselves, is really required for the interests of
the race. Such is the double destruction worked by the alcoholic form of
this waste that if the average sum, say six shillings a week, expended
in the working-class family on alcohol, were invested on behalf of the
possible widows and orphans, not only would they be provided for, but
the fathers would be saved, and they would not become widows and
orphans. In days to come it will be discovered that such matters as
these are the real political economy, the absence or presence of
tariffs, the incidence of taxation and the like, being matters of no
consequence or significance whatever compared with the question,
fundamental in all times and places for every nation and for every
individual: For what are you spending: for bread or a stone, for life or
for death?
The foregoing has been chosen for the forefront of this chapter because
of its bearing on a central economic problem of the time, and also
because, for some reason or other, this alcoholic destruction of
fatherhood, though it is of the utmost importance, has hitherto escaped
the attention of sociological students. We pass now to a second point,
of a wholly different character, which particularly well illustrates
certain of the general principles with which we began. The supreme
importance of alcohol or of anything else for human happiness is
attained only through its influence on the selves of men and women. It
is upon these that our happiness depends--upon the nature and the
nurture, from hour to hour, of our selves and the selves with which we
have to deal. Above all, do women as individuals depend for their
happiness upon the selves of men, as we have suggested.
Now if there be anything certain about the action of alcohol upon the
brain, it is that it degrades the quality of the self. Much of the
cruder pathology of alcohol is open to doubt. A great many of the
supposed degenerative changes in nerve-cells, which were attributed to
it and thought to be irrevocable, are now interpreted otherwise. Chronic
alcoholism is looked upon by such foremost students as Dr. F. W. Mott,
less as a disease due to organic changes produced in the brain than as a
chronic functional derangement due to the continued action of a poison.
This newer interpretation of chronic alcoholism has the very important
practical corollary of encouraging us to the belief, which is frequently
justifiable, that if the chronic intoxication ceases, the individual may
completely or all but completely recover, as would not be the case if
the fine structure of his brain had been actually destroyed. The recent
modification of our views on this subject has, however, only served to
render clearer our understanding of the mental symptoms of alcoholism.
Here is a drug which poisons the organ of the mind. The action of a
single dose persists for a far longer period than used to be supposed,
and thus we now know that in the great majority of civilized men
everywhere, the nervous system, which is the home of the self, is
continuously under the influence of alcohol.
That influence, as we have said, consistently shows itself in a
degradation of the quality of the self. The poison deranges first the
latest and highest products of evolution; it beheads a man, as we may
say, in thin slices from above downwards. Beginning as it does with the
most human, and only at the very last attacking the most animal part of
our nervous constitution, it is essentially the bestializer, save only
that the alcoholized human being is much lower than the beast, on the
general principle, _Corruptio optimi pessima_--the corruption of the
best is the worst.
Now wherever alcohol is consumed women have to pay the penalty for its
daily deterioration in the human scale of the men with whom they live;
nor need any reader of even the smallest experience require any writer's
assurance that in vast numbers of such cases the woman suffers more than
the man. He has its moments of compensation, inadequate though they be;
she has none.
Whilst women suffer in every respect from the influence of alcohol as a
degrader of their men, most of all do they and the race suffer through
the action of alcohol upon the racial instinct. In my book on personal
hygiene was sought an interpretation of the difference between low and
high types of mankind largely in terms of their success or failure in
achieving what may be called the "transmutation" of the racial instinct.
In less metaphorical language this transmutation depends upon the
measure of self-control and deference of present desire to future
purpose. These are supremely human characteristics, and there are none
which alcohol more surely and early attacks. Men are not so constituted
that they are at all likely to profit by any substance which keeps their
racial instinct on its original and less than human plane, and certainly
women suffer in many ways, and with them necessarily the future suffers,
just because of this action of alcohol upon men.
The argument need not be elaborated, but it may be added that the
disastrous action upon young womanhood of the consumption of alcohol by
young manhood is greatly increased when we find, as we do, that the
young women start drinking too. In these modern days, when the
controlling influence of religion and especially of religious fear is
steadily relaxing, the young woman's best protection is to be found in
her own judgment and self-control and prevision of the future. But these
are the very defences which alcohol in her nervous system saps. Every
social worker is familiar with the daily truth that young womanhood
connives at its own ruin under the influence of alcohol, where otherwise
it need not have fallen.
This last consideration leads us to the study of a phenomenon which in
many respects is new and unprecedented, while none could be of worse
omen.
It has for long been alleged that the amount of drinking amongst women
is increasing. When writing an academic thesis on the consequences of
city life, I attempted to discover definite evidence on this point.
Nothing that could be called precise was forthcoming, though the
evidence was abundant that the general assertion is correct. Drinking
amongst women means, of course, drinking amongst mothers. It means
drinking by unborn children. No one concerned with the fundamentals of
national well-being can ignore anything so minatory. Within the last few
years, much attention has been directed to the subject, and the Church
of England Temperance Society, for instance, sent out a form of inquiry
to the medical profession as to their experience in this matter. It may
now be stated, without any fear of contradiction, that drinking has
greatly increased amongst women of all classes during the last twenty
years, and especially, it seems probable, during the latter half of that
period. Along with it has gone an increase in the amount of
drug-taking; some, at any rate, of the drugs being not dissimilar to
alcohol in their action upon mind and body.
It is here necessary not so much to discuss the causes of this fact as
to insist upon its consequences and indicate some possible remedies. So
far as one can judge there seem to be three principal causes for this
increase of drinking amongst women, and quite briefly they may be named
in order to guide the subsequent discussion, though it is not necessary
to occupy space here in discussing all the evidence for this diagnosis.
A cause of some importance at work amongst women of the middle and upper
classes would seem to be the general tendency to revolt against sex
restrictions and limitations. In order to prove themselves the equals of
men, women proceed to demonstrate that they are capable of imitating
men's vices and indulgences. The trainer of chimpanzees for the
music-hall acts on the same principle. Directly the animals can smoke
and drink, they are such good imitations of men, in his judgment and
that of his patrons, as to be worthy of exhibition. Any ape, any boy,
any man, can learn to smoke and drink. It may be taken for granted that
any woman can do likewise, but the actual demonstration is worse than
superfluous.
Much more important as a cause of the increased drinking amongst women
of the lower classes are the modern conditions of factory and industrial
life which so largely take women out of the home; the making of life
being neglected in order to serve some industry or other which, if it
costs the loss of the coming life, is a national cancer, however
grateful its expansion may appear to the capitalist or the Chancellor of
the Exchequer. As the nation cares nothing for its girlhood nor for
directing employment and education for the supreme business of
motherhood, upon which the national existence is always staked, vast
numbers of women in early adolescence are now exposed to the very
conditions of temptation outside the home to which so many of their
brothers have succumbed. The factory girl learns to drink, and when she
marries she takes her drinking habits with her into her home. Modern
industrialism, therefore, is to be cited as one of the causes for the
increase in drinking amongst women. It may be noted that, in Italy, the
temperate race which, according to one elegant but baseless theory, has
been evolved through ages of past drinking, is proving itself
intemperate when its members are exposed in towns to the industrial
conditions which look like national success and the continuance of which
would mean national ruin.
A third cause of this increase is to be found in the greatly enhanced
facility with which alcoholic drinks can now be obtained by women, not
merely outside the home, but within it. So far as Great Britain is
concerned we must trace disastrous consequences to the "heaven-born
finance" of a former illustrious Chancellor of the Exchequer, who made a
little money for the State by selling to grocers permission to sell
alcoholic liquors. That was a great blow at womanhood and especially
motherhood; not to mention its lamentable effect in raising the
death-rate amongst grocers in that intensely obvious and inevitable
manner, the increase of temptation, which nothing can persuade the
enemies of temperance reform to understand.
It is bad enough that women should be able to obtain alcohol as they do
by means of devices which may often prevent their habits from being
discovered at all until irreparable mischief has been done. Here the
cunning and the greed of commercialism have set to work to fool the
public and poison it by a systematic practice which is injurious to all
sections of the community, but especially to women, and which cannot be
too widely reprobated and exposed. All honour is due to the _British
Medical Journal_, the official organ of the British Medical Association,
for its recent attention to this subject. No one can challenge it when
it makes the following assertion regarding meat-wines and other
specifics containing alcohol, which are now so widely advertised and
consumed:--"It may be pointed out that by the use of these meat-wines
the alcoholic habit may be encouraged and established, and that it is a
mistake to suppose that they possess any high nutritive qualities." The
following are analyses to which everyone ought to be able to have
reference, and further information regarding which may be found in the
_British Medical Journal_ for March 27 and May 29, 1909. Let the reader
first note what proportions of alcohol are contained in the accepted
wines, the danger of which is admitted by all, and then let him compare
those figures with the figures which follow:--
ALCOHOL IN ORDINARY WINES
Port 20 per cent. or 3-1/4}
Sherry 20 " " " 3-1/4}Fluid drachms
Champagne 10/15 " " " 1-3/4}in a wineglassful.
Hock 10 " " " 1-1/2}
Claret 9 " " " 1-1/2}
ALCOHOL IN MEAT WINES
Bendle's 20.3 per cent. or 3-1/4}
Bivo 19.2 " " " 3 }
Bovril 20.15 " " " 3-1/4}Fluid drachms
Glendenning's 20.8 " " " 3-1/3}in a wineglassful.
Lemco 17.26 " " " 2-3/4}
Vin Regno 16.05 " " " 2-1/2}
Wincarnis 19.6 " " " 3 }
ALCOHOL IN TONIC WINES
Armbrecht's Coca Wine 15.05%
Bugeaud's Wine 14.80%
Baudon's Wine 12.75%
Busart's Wine 16.85%
Christy's Kola Wine 18.85%
Hall's Wine 17.85%
Mariani's Coca Wine 16.40%
Marza Wine 17.48%
Nourry's Iodinated Wine 11.50%
Quina Laroche 16.90%
St. Raphael Quinquina Wine 16.89%
St. Raphael Tannin Wine 14.65%
Savar's Coca Wine 23.40%
Serravallo's Bark and Iron 17.26%
Vana 19.20%
Vibrona 19.30%
In order to complete our reference to this subject, the following may be
quoted from an excellent little pamphlet which is published by the
National Temperance League. The United States Government Laboratory
affords striking evidence of the large percentages of alcohol contained
in specifics which are stated to be largely used by persons who profess
to be total abstainers. Of these the following are given as examples:--
Paine's Celery Compound 21.00%
Peruna 23.00%
Brown's Blood Purifier 23.00%
Brown's Vervain Restorer 25.75%
Hostetter's Bitters 44.30%
But indeed we are far from having covered the ground in Great Britain
alone. There are many well-known preparations which consist almost
entirely of alcohol and water, together with small quantities of
flavouring matter nominally medicinal. Thus we find, for instance, the
following proportions of alcohol in--
Powell's Balsam of Aniseed 40.0%
Dill's Diabetic Mixture 35.0%
Congreve's Balsamic Elixir 25.5%
Steven's Consumption Cure 21.3%
Hood's Sarsaparilla 19.6%
There are also other compounds such as Crosby's Balsamic Cough Elixir,
Townsend's American Sarsaparilla, and Warner's Safe Cure, which contain
from 8 to 10-1/2 per cent. of alcohol. As the _British Medical Journal_
justly points out, in a mixture of which a table-spoonful is to be taken
five or six times a day a proportion of 10 per cent. of alcohol is by no
means negligible.
Let it be noted further that though most malt extracts are free from
alcohol, that which is called "bynin" contains 8.3 per cent, and
"standard liquid" 5 per cent. The _British Medical Journal_ has also
shown that there is at least one "inebriety cure" in Great Britain which
consists of a liquid containing just under 30 per cent. of alcohol.
On this whole subject it is impossible to speak too strongly, more
especially when one is concerned with the interests of woman and
womanhood. It is true that in consequence of the labours of those few
keen workers whom the impotent and the meaningless and the selfish call
fanatics, we are making a beginning in the matter of education on
Temperance. But apart from that, which amounts only to very little as
yet, it is the lamentable truth that the State does absolutely nothing
whatever to protect the community and especially its women from the
manifold evils which are involved in such figures as those here quoted.
The State wants money, and life is a trifle. Anything that can pay toll
to the State may therefore go without further question. A tax has been
paid on all the alcohol in these things. In many cases, also, a further
tax has been paid for the government stamp on patent medicines. That the
medicine may be dangerous, that it may be a cruel swindle, that it may
take from consumptives and others money which is sorely needed for air
and food, and give them in return what is worse than nothing--all these
things are nothing to the State if the tax is paid.
Preparations such as those which have been mentioned above have no place
or status whatever in scientific medicine. Their constituents are known
and their action is known. The public pays for sarsaparilla, for
instance, and simply gets a 20 per cent. solution of flavoured alcohol,
and there is no one to inform it that sarsaparilla has been exhaustively
studied by pharmacologists, employing every means of observation and
experiment in their power, and that none of them have yet been able to
detect its capacity to modify the body or any function of the body in
any degree at all whether in health or disease. This is only one of many
instances that might be named; every preparation of which the
composition is not stated is suspect. Men are paying for these things at
this moment under the impression that they are buying valuable tonics
which will save their wives from the consequences of the drink craving
and help to avert it. Large numbers of women are ruining themselves in
purse and in body quite secretly under cover of these scandalous abuses
which are allowed to go on from year to year, and which are undoubtedly
doing more injury to the feminine--that is to say, to the more
important--half of the community in each succeeding year. At least let
the facts be known. Let liberty be believed in and encouraged; but if
these things are to be made and sold and bought, let their composition
be stated on the bottles. The composition of milk is supervised by the
State; margarine, which is harmless and an excellent food, may not be
sold as butter; alcohol, which is noxious, may be sold under any lying
name, but so long as the State gets its percentage, it is well pleased.
The official organ of the medical profession in this country has done
well to draw renewed attention to this subject. Surely it ought to be
possible for the profession and the advocates of temperance to join
hands for the promotion of legislation in a direction where reform
cannot otherwise be obtained. Something, one hopes and believes, can be
done by merely writing on the subject. A certain number of women who
read this book will be deterred from buying these things on finding that
they are simply "masked alcohol" and that their medicinal virtues are
less than _nil_. But though all that is to the good, only legislation
can meet the real need. These preparations offer insidious means of
teaching women to drink, and when the habit is established, nothing can
be accomplished by revealing to the victim the history of its origin.
The minimum demand for legislation should be, at the very least, that
all preparations of this kind should have their composition stated with
every portion of them that is vended to the public. Assuredly the
champions of womanhood will have to take this matter up soon, and the
sooner the better. There is no need to be a fanatic, there is no need
even to be a teetotaler, in order to satisfy oneself that here is a
crying abuse which is ruining the unwarned and the unprotected up and
down the land, and which is quite definitely and obviously within the
capacity of legislation to control effectively and finally.
Let us turn now to the general question of the organic or physiological
relations between womanhood and alcohol. Both sexes of human beings are
identical in a vast majority of their characters, and the various
reactions to alcohol come within this number. There is no need to repeat
here any of the facts and conclusions which have been set forth at
length elsewhere. What was said there applies to women as to men. That
is true so far as the individual is concerned and it is also true that,
so far as the race is concerned, the germ-plasm or germ-cells in both
sexes alike may be injured by the continued consumption of large
quantities of alcohol.
There remains the important fact, which it is the present writer's
constant effort to bring to the notice of Eugenists, that alcohol has
special relations to motherhood, to which there can necessarily be no
correspondence in the case of the other sex, and though motherhood, as
such, is not the subject of this book, yet it would be most pedantically
to limit the usefulness which one hopes it may possess if we were to
omit the discussion, as brief as possible, of the effect of alcohol upon
womanhood at the time when womanhood is expressing itself in its supreme
function.
In my book on Eugenics there is merely the briefest allusion in a
foot-note to this subject, and I confess myself now ashamed of having
dealt with it in that utterly inadequate fashion. In practical
eugenics,--though sooth to say when eugenics begins to become practical
many professing eugenists seem to think that it is wandering from the
point--the great fact of expectant motherhood must be reckoned with. To
decline to do so is in effect to declare that we are greatly concerned
with bringing the right germ-cells together, but have nothing to do with
what may or may not happen to the product of their union. We desire,
however, not merely conjugated germ-cells, but worthy men and women, and
expectant motherhood is therefore part of the eugenic province.
Unfortunately it is easier to invent terms and categories and get people
to accept them than to control their use of one's terms thereafter.
Otherwise, I should forbid the use of the term Eugenist at all by anyone
who is unprepared to move a finger or utter a word on behalf of the care
and the protection of expectant motherhood.
It is quite true that the question of expectant motherhood has nothing
to do with heredity in the proper sense of that term. We are dealing now
with "nurture," not with "nature," but we are dealing with a department
of nurture which can only be understood when we realize that human
beings begin their lives nine months or so before they are born, and
that the first stage of their nurture is coincident with what we call
expectant motherhood, whilst the second stage of their nurture, normally
and properly, ought to be coincident with what we may call nursing
motherhood.
Let us then acquaint ourselves with the fact, fully established by
experimental and chemical observation, that alcohol given to the
expectant mother finds its way into the organism of the child. Thus, as
we should expect, alcohol can readily be demonstrated in a newborn child
when the drug has been given to the mother just before its birth.
It must be understood that the circulation of the mother and of her
child are each complete and self-contained. They come into relation in
the double organ called the placenta, and it has been exhaustively
proved that this organ is so constituted as in large measure to protect
the child from injurious influences acting upon and in the mother. We
may therefore speak of the placenta as a filter. Its protective action
explains the facts, so familiar to medical men and philanthropic
workers, that healthy and undamaged children are often born to mothers
who are stricken with mortal disease--most notably, perhaps, in the case
of consumption. It becomes a most important matter to ascertain the
limits of the placental power, and by observation upon human beings and
experiment upon the lower animals this matter has been very thoroughly
elucidated of late years. There are many kinds of poison, and many
varieties of those living poisons that we call microbes, which the
placenta does not allow to pass through from the mother's blood-vessels
into those of the child, and which are unable, fortunately for the
child, to break down the placental resistance. On the other hand, there
are certain microbes and certain poisons which readily pass through the
placenta. Conspicuous amongst these are alcohol, lead and arsenic, and
it is especially important to realize that alcohol injures the child not
merely by its own passage through the placenta, but by injuring that
organ, so that its efficiency as a filter is impaired. On the whole
subject of expectant motherhood and the morbid influences which may act
upon it, the greatest living authority is my friend and teacher, Dr. J.
W. Ballantyne of Edinburgh. He contributed an important paper on this
subject to our first National Conference on Infantile Mortality held in
1906.[22] I only wish it were possible to reproduce in full here Dr.
Ballantyne's paper on the Ante-Natal Causes of Infantile Mortality. The
unread critic who is so ready with the word fanatic whenever alcohol is
attacked might begin to derive from it some faint idea of the quality
and massiveness of the evidence upon which our case is based. Here it
must suffice merely to quote the verdict at which Dr. Ballantyne arrives
after surveying all the evidence on the subject that had been obtained
up to the year 1906. He summarizes as follows:--
"It must then be concluded that parental and especially maternal
alcoholism of the kind to which the name of chronic drunkenness or
persistent soaking is applied, is the source of both ante-natal and
post-natal mortality. It acts in all the three ways in which I
indicated that ante-natal causes can be shown to act in relation to
the increase of infantile mortality, viz.,.by causing abortions.,
by predisposing to premature labours, and by weakening the infant
by disease or deformity so that it more readily succumbs to
ordinary morbid influences at and after birth. By causing diseases
of the kidneys and of the placenta it also leads to that failure of
the filter to which I have already referred; the placenta being
damaged, not only does the alcohol more readily pass through it
itself, but it is also possible for other poisons, germs, and
toxins to cross over into the fatal economy. So it comes about that
the most disastrous consequences are entailed upon the unborn
infant in connection with syphilis, lead-poisoning, fevers, and
the like in the intemperate mother."
The foregoing was written as long ago as 1906, and various workers have
helped to confirm it since that date.
We must further learn that alcohol taken by the mother who nurses her
child has an organic relation to the child after birth. It is true,
indeed, that according to a celebrated observer, Professor von Bunge,
the influence of alcoholism in preceding generations is such that the
daughters of such a stock are mostly unable to nurse their children. It
is not quite certain that Professor von Bunge has proved his case, but
it is definitely proved that even if alcoholism in the maternal
grandparent has not altogether prevented a child from being fed in the
natural fashion, it may yet suffer gravely in consequence of receiving
alcohol in its mother's milk. In the case of the nursing mother, there
is one fresh avenue of excretion which the organism can employ for
ridding itself of the poison, and to the efforts of the lungs and the
kidneys are added those of the breasts. Alcohol can be readily traced in
the mother's milk within twenty minutes of its entry into her stomach,
and may be detected in it for as long as eight hours after a large dose.
Many cases are on record where infants at the breast have thus become
the subjects of both acute and chronic alcoholic poisoning. We have
numerous reports of convulsions and other disorders occurring in infants
when the nurse has taken liquor, and ceasing when she has been put on a
non-alcoholic diet. A most distinguished lady, Dr. Mary Scharlieb, may
be quoted in this connection, or the reader may indeed refer to the
chapter, "Alcoholism in Relation to Women and Children," contributed by
her to the volume "The Drink Problem" in my New Library of Medicine. She
says, "The child, then, absolutely receives alcohol as part of his diet
with the worst effect upon his organs, for alcohol has a greater effect
upon cells in proportion to their immaturity." Further, as she points
out, "the milk of the alcoholic mother not only contains alcohol, but it
is otherwise unsuitable for the infant's nourishment; it does not
contain the proper proportions of proteid, sugar, fat, etc., and it is
therefore not suited for the building up of a healthy body."
It is plain that here we cannot avoid criticism of an almost universal
medical practice. Our concern in the present volume is not with children
but women; and in dealing with the effects of maternal alcoholism upon
childhood, the main intention is being kept in view. As regards the
giving of alcohol to the nursing mother, there is no doubt that the
child is more seriously in danger than she is. There is no doubt also
that, as one has often pointed out, the Children Act which forbids the
giving of alcohol to children under five years old is being broken when
the nursing mother takes alcohol. I refer to this subject here because
only thus can we come to a decision on the question whether the nursing
mother owes the taking of alcohol as a duty to her child. She may be a
teetotaler; she may fear to take alcohol; and she may be authoritatively
told that it is her duty to do so because the quality of her milk will
be improved. In such a case she may yield, though often with a wry face;
and thus we have the frequent beginning of disasters to which there is
no end.
The truth is that the medical profession has long erred in this respect.
Judgment has gone by superficials. Undoubtedly there is a greater bulk
of milk when stout and porter are taken. But everyone knows that
ordinary household milk may come from the cow or from the pump. The
question is not how much bulk is there, but what does the bulk consist
of? Definite chemical evidence, which may be repeated a thousand times,
and which is allowed to go unchallenged by the vast host of doctors who
are prescribing alcohol for nursing mothers all over the world, shows us
that its influence is to increase the bulk of the milk while reducing
the amount of its nutritive constituents, and adding to them one which
is poisonous. The increase of bulk is easy to explain. Alcohol is
exceedingly avid of water. Thus the common experience that alcoholic
liquors tend to increase the desire for liquid can readily be explained.
Alcohol, leaving the blood, tends to withdraw with itself, if it can, a
quantity of water. These two, in the milk, between them maintain the
added bulk on account of which alcoholic liquors are so widely ordered
for and drunk by nursing mothers throughout the civilized world. The
infant mortality is thus contributed to, and many women are urged and
deceived by their love for their children into a practice which achieves
their own ruin. Doctors look back a hundred years or so and observe the
amazing practices of their predecessors. They have record of
prescriptions and treatments which were ridiculous or disgusting or
trivial or painful; they have abundant record of practices which were
deadly, and for which any medical man at the present day might be called
upon to pay heavy damages or indicted for manslaughter. Yet in the
matter of the indiscriminate and ignorant employment of alcohol, in
defiance of overwhelmingly proved facts which will not be challenged by
any of those whom this criticism hits and who will virulently resent it
and decry its author, doctors of the present day are assuredly earning
the astonished contempt of their successors in times by no means remote.
A certain number of women who nurse or will nurse will read this book.
Of these not a few will be ordered various alcoholic beverages by their
medical attendant in order to aid this function. Let them obey his
orders when he has satisfactorily answered the following questions: Are
you aware that part of the alcohol will pass unchanged through my breast
into my baby's body? Are you aware that if my milk is analyzed it will
be found to contain less food for the baby with more bulk than if I were
to do without the alcohol? Are you aware that careful enquiry and
observation have shown that the best foods for the making of milk are
those which contain the constituents of milk--as seems not
unreasonable--like milk itself and bread and butter and meat? Can you
begin to explain any imaginable process by which either the animal or
the vegetable body could build up a molecule composed as the molecule of
alcohol is into any of the nutritive ingredients in milk? That catechism
is quite short, but it will suffice.
A serious error which has long been made by temperance workers consists
in supposing that the problem of alcoholism is the problem of
drunkenness. They speak of "the sin of intemperance," and by that term
they mean only such intemperance as produces what should properly be
called acute alcoholic intoxication. The friends of alcohol eagerly
accept an error which suits their case so admirably. Nothing can suit
them better than to assume that alcohol does no ill apart from causing
drunkenness. Better still, they are able to quote the case of the
incurable drunkard, suffering from an uncontrollable craving, and to
point out quite truly that he will get drunk in any case no matter how
many public-houses, for instance, we close.
It was always a gross error to suppose that drunkenness was the whole of
the evil done by alcohol; if, indeed, it be one per cent. of it, which
we may doubt. This is not a point which one need trouble to argue here,
except in so far as our right understanding of it is necessary if we are
to see the meaning of current changes in the drinking habits of the
people. That women are drinking more, everyone grants. That this is evil
not merely for the women of the present but for both sexes in the
future, I am constantly asserting. But it will not do at all to use mere
drunkenness as our measure of what is happening amongst women. We know
that in either sex a single bout of drinking, say once a week on
Saturday night, may leave the individual little worse, may injure health
quite inappreciably, if at all; it may not interfere with his work, and
may even be of small economic importance. In such a coal-mining county
as Durham, for instance, where alcohol cannot be drunk in association
with work because the workman and his fellows know that the safety of
their lives will not permit it, we find a huge proportion of arrests for
drunkenness, and it might be supposed that in this most drunken county
in England we should find the highest proportion of permanent
consequences of alcoholism. On the contrary, as Dr. Sullivan says,
"owing to their relative freedom from industrial drinking coal-miners
show a remarkably low rate of alcoholic mortality, ranking in fact with
the agriculturists and below all the other industrial groups." Here is a
simple statistical fact which continues true year by year, and the
significance of which must be insisted upon.
In the case of women, the very obvious and natural tendency is for the
proportion of drunkenness to the alcohol consumed to be much lower than
in the case of men. Drunkenness is commonly the result of convivial
drinking. A company of men get together, and they help each other to get
drunk. Women are not subjected to so many temptations in this respect.
Their drinking is industrial drinking,--above all, at the supreme
industry, which is the culture of the racial life. Like other industrial
drinking, it is less conspicuous than convivial drinking; it leads to
few arrests for drunkenness, but it has far graver effects on the
individual, and it shows its consequences in the industrial product with
which in this case no other industrial product can compare. Now unless
we disabuse ourselves once and for all of the notion that the drink
question is merely the drunkenness question, we shall never succeed in
rightly approaching and dealing with this most ominous development of
modern civilization, to which I have done such imperfect justice in the
present chapter.
Dr. Sullivan[23] has some important remarks on this subject from which
one cannot do better than freely quote. As a distinguished and
experienced Medical Officer in H. M. Prison Service, notably at
Holloway, where so many women have been under his care, Dr. Sullivan has
very special credentials, even if the internal evidence of his book did
not convince us. He says that:--
"The domestic occupations which are the chief field of women's
activities obviously allow ample opportunity for the continuance of
alcoholic habits formed prior to marriage. This is a matter of much
importance. For the ordinary existence of the working man's wife,
with its succession of pregnancies and sucklings, and the
management of a brood of children in cramped surroundings, will of
itself be very likely to promote tippling; and if a knowledge of
the effect of alcohol as an industrial excitant has been acquired
by the factory girl, it is pretty sure of further development in
the married woman. Instances of this sort, in which the discomforts
of the first pregnancy stimulate the growth of a rudimentary habit
of industrial drinking to confirmed intemperance, are tolerably
common in any wide experience of the alcoholic."
The following paragraph must also be quoted for its clear indication of
a matter which is of prime importance, which no one denies, and yet of
which no statesman or politician has begun to take cognizance:--
"The employment of women in the ordinary industrial occupations not
only involves a disorganization of their domestic duties if they
are married, but it also interferes with the acquisition of
housewifely knowledge during girlhood. The result is that appalling
ignorance of everything connected with cookery, with cleanliness,
with the management of children, which make the average wife and
mother in the lower working class in this country one of the most
helpless and thriftless of beings, and which therefore impels the
workman, whose comfort depends on her, not only to spend his free
time in the public-house, but also tends to make him look to
alcohol as a necessary condiment with his tasteless and
indigestible diet. Both directly and indirectly, therefore, the
employments that withdraw women from domestic pursuits are likely
to increase alcoholism, and, it may be added, to increase its
greatest potency for evil, namely its influence on the health of
the stock."
Elsewhere I have endeavoured to deal with the general physiology of
alcohol and its relations to race-culture. Here our special concern has
been woman, and not woman as mother, but rather woman as individual. We
have had specially to refer, however, to expectant and nursing
motherhood because each of these offers special temptations and
opportunities for the beginning of the alcoholic habit or strengthening
its hold in a deadly fashion, and it is certainly necessary for us to
know that the supposed advantages to the child, which constitute a new
argument for alcohol at these times, are not advantages but injuries
which may be grave and often fatal. The utterly incomprehensible thing
is how anyone can suppose or ever could suppose otherwise.
It is necessary to add a few words to the foregoing since there has
recently appeared what purports to be a contribution to some of the
problems that have concerned us. Part of the foregoing argument has
rested upon the fact, only too definitely, variously and frequently
proved, that alcoholism in women prejudices the performance of their
supreme functions. Complicated as the maternal relation to the future
is, the relations of alcohol to the problem are correspondingly so, and
in any discussion that is to be of value we must draw the necessary
distinctions. In many scientific contributions to the subject this has
already been done. We have identified certain degenerate stocks who
display the symptoms of alcoholism. The alcohol may aggravate their
degeneracy but it is not the prime cause of it in them, though it may
have been so in their ancestors. The children of such persons are
degenerate also, and as the class is numerous and fertile there is here
a social problem which is not primarily a problem in alcohol, but is
accidentally connected therewith simply because the proneness to
alcoholism is a symptom of the degeneracy.
Quite distinct from the foregoing there is the influence of alcohol upon
mothers and motherhood that would otherwise have been healthy. Alcohol,
like lead, as has been shown elsewhere, may injure the racial elements
in the mother before even expectant motherhood occurs. Later, it may
prejudice both expectant motherhood and nursing motherhood; further it
is often the primary cause of over-laying and of chronic cruelty and
neglect. Until quite lately there was also the action of the
public-house upon the children to be reckoned with, where the mother
visited it and was allowed to take them with her. That, however, has
been at last put a stop to in England, following the example of
civilization elsewhere.
But it will be clear that the problem is a complicated one. It has been
confidently attacked by Professor Karl Pearson in a Report upon "the
influence of parental alcoholism upon the offspring," and the
conclusions of that Report have been widely circulated and are being
circulated almost wherever the monetary interest of alcohol has power.
Briefly, Professor Pearson came to the conclusion that the children of
drunken parents are, on the average, superior to those of sober parents
in physique and in intelligence, in sight and in freedom from epilepsy
and other diseases. This, of course, as everybody knows, is obvious
nonsense, and the only problem remaining is how to account for its
assertion. I have dealt with that question at length elsewhere,[24] and
here need only note in a word that Professor Pearson's Report includes
no comparison between the children of abstainers and drinkers, since the
number of abstainers was too few to be treated separately; that
Professor Pearson attaches no strict meaning to the term alcoholism, by
which he means anything from what the word really means down to a
general suspicion that the parents were drinking more than was good for
themselves or their home; and finally that in studying the influence of
alcohol upon offspring Professor Pearson has omitted to enquire in a
single case whether the alcoholism or the offspring came first. The
Report has no scientific basis whatever and has been riddled with
criticism by expert students of every kind, including not merely
students of alcoholism but also Professor Alfred Marshall of Cambridge,
the greatest English-speaking economist of the time, who has shown that
there are no grounds for the assumptions made by Professor Pearson in
that part of his argument which is based upon the economic efficiency of
drinking and non-drinking parents. The publication of this Report merely
hastens the rapid decadence of "biometry," the foundations of which have
already been sapped by the re-discovery of Mendelism in 1900; but it was
necessary to refer to the matter here, since in the advertisements and
the other printed matter paid for by the alcoholic party, the public is
being informed that the children of alcoholic parents have been proved
to be, on the whole, superior to those of non-alcoholic parents. This
question has been exhaustively studied, yet again, in London by Dr.
Sullivan, in Helsingfors by Professor Laitinen, and also in New York in
an enquiry which actually embraced no less than fifty-five thousand
school children. The elementary fallacies entertained by Professor
Pearson were of course avoided and the uniform result in these and in a
host of other enquiries that might be named is the only result which
could be imagined in a universe where causes have effects.
The particular causes under consideration have been having their effects
for a very long time. It begins to be more and more clear that they have
played a great part in the history of mankind. As the "history" we
learnt at school is more and more discredited, there is slowly coming
into being a real kind of history which deals with the essentials of
national life and death, and is based upon the principles of organic
evolution. This is a thesis which one has attempted to justify in a
previous book, but one aspect of it must be recurred to here. Our modern
study of various diseases and poisons is throwing a light on the life of
nations. Take for instance the modern theories as to the influence of
malarial poison upon Greece. In the case of alcohol, we now have
evidence which is real and unchallengeable. The properties which it
displays when we study it to-day have always been and always will be its
properties. We find that it has certain actions on living protoplasm in
the twentieth century; we know enough of the uniformity of nature to
realize that it had those actions in the tenth century, and will have
them in the thirtieth. As we study under the microscope the influence of
alcohol upon the racial tissues in the individual,[25] and therein find
confirmation of experimental study and observation by all the other
means available to science, we begin to see that the greatest facts of
history are those of which historians have no word, and not least
amongst these has ever been the influence of alcohol upon parenthood. It
is possible to adduce arguments in favour of the view that the
practically complete immunity of their parenthood from alcohol is one of
the great factors that explain the all but unexampled persistence of
the Jews and their present status in the van of the world's thought and
work. For history it is the parents that matter as against the
non-parents, and of the parents it is the mothers even more than the
fathers. The freedom of the Jews as a whole from alcoholism is more
marked than ever in the case of their women; that is to say, in the case
of their mothers.
We see the part-results of this in our own time when we compare the
infant mortality amongst the Jews with that of their Gentile neighbours
in a great city such as London or Leeds. As everyone should know, there
is a huge disparity between the figures in the two cases, and in some
records it has been found that under equal conditions two Gentile babies
will die for each Jewish baby. The conditions are of course not equal,
because the Jewish babies have Jewish motherhood, splendidly backed up
as it usually is by Jewish fatherhood; whereas the Gentile babies have a
very inferior parental care. Now if it were that infant mortality, as
most people suppose, simply meant the death of a certain number of
babies, the foregoing facts would have no particular bearing upon the
questions of racial survival, except in so far as those questions depend
upon mere numbers. But the advocates of the great campaign against
infant mortality have always maintained that the actual mortality is
only one effect of the causes which produce it. When people have said
that the loss of a certain number of babies mattered little, we have
always replied that for every baby killed many were damaged. This
contention has now been proved up to the hilt in the remarkable
official enquiry, the first of its kind, made by Dr. Newsholme, now
Chief Medical Officer of the Local Government Board.[26] He studied
infant mortality in relation to the mortality of children and young
people at all subsequent ages, and he proved, once and for all, that
infant mortality is what we have always maintained it to be, not merely
a disaster in itself but an evidence of causes which injure the health
and vigour of the survivors at all ages. Wherever infant mortality is
highest, there child mortality is highest, and the mortality of boys and
girls at puberty and during the early years of adolescence when the body
is preparing for and becoming capable of parenthood. The evil conditions
that cause infant mortality are thus proved to be far-reaching and much
wider in their effects than any but the students of the subject have yet
realized.
This chapter must be brought to a close, but it may be added that the
emergence of sober nations, such as Japan and Turkey, into contemporary
history, and the possibilities latent in China,--to mention none other
of the "dying nations," so very much alive, at whom glass-eyed
politicians used to sneer--constitutes one of the major facts of
contemporary history. No one can yet say whether these nations will have
the wisdom to retain their ancient habits or whether they will accept
our whisky along with our parliamentary institutions and motor-cars.
Much future history rests upon this issue.
But I have little doubt that whatever happens in the case of Japan and
Turkey, Jewish parenthood will retain the quality which has long ago
become fixed as a racial characteristic, and that the race which has
survived so much oppression and so many of its oppressors will survive
contemporary abuse and the abusers. Its women nurse their own babies and
have retained the power to do so. Neither before birth nor after do they
feed the life that is to be on alcohol; they lay rightly the foundations
of the future, where alone those foundations can be durably laid. The
reader is not necessarily asked to admire them or to like them or to
speak well of them, but if he desires the strength and continuance of
whatever race or nation he belongs to, he will do well to imitate them.
It seems necessary to believe in the yellow peril, though not, of
course, in its absurd form of a military nightmare. The pressure of
population is the irresistible force of history. It depends, of course,
upon parenthood, and more especially upon motherhood and therefore upon
womanhood. At present the motherhood of the yellow races is sober. If it
remains so, and if the motherhood of Western races takes the course
which motherhood has taken for many years past in England, it is very
sure that in the Armageddon of the future, those ancient races, Semitic
and Mongol, which had achieved civilization when Europe was in the Stone
Age, will be in a position of immense advantage as against our own race,
which is threatening, at any rate in England, to follow the example of
many races of which little record, or none, now remains, and drink
itself to death.