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.