It would have been well if the temperance propaganda from the first, say two generations ago in Great Britain, had adopted this motto. But its adoption is far more urgent to-day in consequence of the fact, unfortunately no longer to be questioned, that drinking amongst women, the mothers of the future, is, and has been for some time, steadily increasing. Children yet unborn must be protected from the injury which may be inflicted upon them by those who will be their mothers. Yet though there is more need for action in this regard than ever before, and though Mr. G. R. Sims in his books The Cry of the Children and The Black Stain has lately drawn wide attention to the subject, we have seen that the principle of women and children first, a principle derived from the ideal of race-culture, and directly serving that ideal, was almost wholly ignored in the Licensing Bill of 1908. The motto “Money, not motherhood,” is a bad one for the framers of a temperance measure. If ever we have a temperance measure worthy the name the motto of its framers will be “Motherhood, not money.” Such a measure will most certainly have to introduce the principle of indeterminate sentences—or rather, indeterminate care—in the treatment of the chronic inebriate. There is no possibility of two opinions as to the urgent and indispensable necessity of such treatment, nor yet as to its scrupulous humanity both for the unfortunate victim himself or herself and for the unborn.
The word “reformatory” had better be abolished from official language, since it leads accredited people to write to The Times such foolishness as “reformation, not mere detention.”
Further, the expense of dealing with the chronic inebriate in this, the only humane and economical way, had better fall entirely and directly upon the state. It must not be possible again for a local authority, even the London County Council, however ignorant or criminally careless, to commit a public indecency like that already recorded—but the full record of which none of us will live to see.
An unpunished magistrate.—Yet again, in this measure there must be some means of compelling such magistrates as cannot be educated. At present, even when accommodation is provided, the unfortunate creature of the Jane Cakebread type, when she is only just beginning to enter into competition with that horrible record, and when she is therefore most dangerous as regards the possibility of motherhood, can be detained only by the magistrate's order. Now it is very much less trouble for all concerned to say “five shillings or a week” than to make the necessary enquiries in such cases. Further, in putting this measure of one's dreams upon the statute book, we shall have to remember that the idea of protective care and the eugenic idea are, to say the least, not native in the mind of every magistrate. In Dr. Welsh Branthwaite's report for 1906, there is quoted a case where a woman had been habitually drunken for at least thirteen years previous to her committal to a reformatory. Her known sentences included 27 fines, and 138 terms of imprisonment. She was feeble-minded. On the termination of her reformatory sentence the discharge certificate described her as “quite unfit to control her own actions,” and “certain to succumb to the first temptation to drink.” The woman was found drunk a few hours after discharge. Said the magistrate, “this case clearly proves that it is almost useless trying to reform such women as this.... I think, after all, the old way is best and therefore I sentence her to one month with hard labour.” I refrain from suggesting a suitable sentence for the magistrate: doubtless he got off scot-free.
Surely we might agree, as regards this racial poison, that at least parenthood and the future must be kept out of its clutches. It may be, it assuredly is, a deplorable thing that the woman of fifty, to take an instance, should become alcoholic, but at the worst this is only the fate of an individual—in the main at any rate. Such principles as these will some day be the cardinal principles of legislation, and not only in regard to alcohol. The time will and must come when public opinion will urge, whether in the name of a New Imperialism or of common morality or of self-protection, that in our attempts to deal with alcohol we shall begin by removing its fingers from the throat of the race: “Women and children first.”
The Report of the Inebriates Committee.—In January, 1909, the Committee which was at last appointed to consider this matter made its Report.[73] I have not the literary capacity to comment adequately upon the political wisdom which brings in a Licensing Bill, devotes vast labour and much time to it and has it rejected by the House of Lords, while such a Committee as this is at work. The spirit of the politician who spoke of “those damned professors” still reigns over us, and will certainly ruin us unless speedily deposed. However, here is the Report, and its recommendations are earnestly to be commended to the study of all students. New legislation, as it shows, is urgently required, and it is pre-eminently the duty of every eugenist to hasten its coming. This is not a party question, but merely a national one, and will therefore be dealt with by politicians only under external pressure, such as produced the Committee itself. The finger of public opinion must apply that pressure forthwith.
The recommendations of the Committee are so admirable and thorough and eugenic in effect as to temper one's disappointment that the Report contains no definite, overt recognition of the eugenic idea. I had hoped that the evidence prepared and submitted to the Committee for the Eugenics Education Society would suffice to ensure the recognition of the eugenic idea in the Report, for the first time, we may suppose, in official history. For the present we may merely note that the suggestions made in preceding pages are confirmed by the Committee's Report, and that the next legislation bearing on the question of temperance will undoubtedly have to attack the subject in this radical manner—by what will be in effect the sterilisation of the habitual drinker of either sex and any social status. The Committee do not recognise that that is what their Report involves, much less that that gives it its real value; but so it is, as the year 1950 will be late enough to show.
Much time and trouble were spent in preparing for the Eugenics Education Society answers to many of the questions submitted to it by the Committee, and the Society may fairly claim, I think, that its original services to this matter were well-continued. The present writer also prepared for the Society a Memorandum (Minutes of Evidence, p. 189), which perhaps fairly sums up, in the briefest possible space, the indisputable relations between alcohol and parenthood, and which may therefore be reprinted here. The reader will notice an omission in that nothing is said as to the effects of alcohol in injuring the germ-cells of healthy stock of either sex. The omission was made in order that nothing possibly disputable might be included. It has already been argued that on grounds both of fact and of theory there is every reason to recognise in alcohol, as in syphilis and in lead, a racial poison, originating racial degeneration which, in accordance with generally recognised principles, shows itself in the latest, highest and therefore most delicate portions of the organism.
The Memorandum is as follows:—