Mankind must first learn to renounce Mammon and set up Life as its God; but to that also we shall come—or perish, for Life is a jealous God and visits the sins of the fathers upon the third and fourth generation.
CHAPTER XXI
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:—