Chapter XIII: The Racial Poisons: Alcohol55 (2)

=Mr. Balfour on legislation.=--Surely the moral of this argument is clear. The most important, the most radical, the most practicable of all temperance measures is that which attacks the main source of supply of the drunkard. When a Licensing Bill is brought before the House of Commons, Mr. Balfour repeats the ancient piece of nonsense that you cannot make people moral by Act of Parliament--an assertion that any child can see to be a muddle. We may let that pass for the moment, but Mr. Balfour is a thinker, a student of biology, and heredity in especial, and he has lately been lecturing on “Decadence.” Might it not have been expected that such a man would take an opportunity to say what the humblest serious student of the subject would have said, and thereby to bring far more damaging criticism against the opposing party's bill than any he hinted at? He might have said, “Your bill, even if passed, will accomplish little, or relatively little, at great cost, because you have no grasp of the principles of the subject. You have no idea of what drunkenness really is. If your bill were worth a straw it would seek as a primary principle to safeguard the race by arresting the supply of potential drunkards. Your endless financial clauses deal merely with the re-distribution of money, but your bill has no clause that deals with the only business of governments, the creation and the economy of the only real wealth, which is human life.” That is what the ex-Premier did not say. He had plenty of passion, plenty of party-feeling to give fire to his words, but so far as knowledge is concerned or any conception of what alone is the wealth of nations, there was nothing to choose between Mr. Balfour and Mr. Asquith. Passion you must have if you are to do anything, but not party-passion: whereas if you have passion for life and for children, not only will it be effective, but, notwithstanding all that the psychologists tell us as to the vitiation of judgment by emotion, it will actually teach you the supreme and eternal truths.

In this book hitherto little has been said as to formal eugenic legislation. I believe with Etienne that it is opinion which governs the world: legislation in front of public opinion brings all law into contempt. But in his first speech opposing the Licensing Bill of 1908, Mr. Balfour, the author of the Licensing Bill of 1904, decried legislation. “Intemperance,” he said, “is a vice”: and legislation can do practically nothing in dealing with a vice. Plainly Mr. Balfour is ignorant of the nature of intemperance, which largely depends upon transmitted and inherent brain defect. He therefore lost his opportunity of pointing out in what fashion you _can_ actually, notwithstanding the parrots, make people sober by Act of Parliament--viz., by forbidding parenthood to those whose children would almost certainly become drunkards. We who are not politicians, much less ex-Premiers, must make our own proposals then. Last year's criticism of the London County Council began, I believe, to educate public opinion to the necessary point. In the name of race-culture and the New Patriotism, in the name of morality and charity and science, we must demand, obtain and carry into effect the most stringent and comprehensive legislation, such as effectively to forbid parenthood on the part of the chronic inebriate. Ere long, the person who would have become a chronic inebriate will be cared for and protected during childhood and thereafter,--with the same result. This solution of the problem is denounced, says Dr. Archdall Reid,

“... as horrible, as Malthusian, as immoral, as impracticable....
The alternative is more horrible and more immoral still. If by any
means we save the inebriates of this generation, but permit them
to have offspring, future generations must deal with an increased
number of inebriates.... The experience of many centuries has
rendered it sufficiently plain, that while there is drink, there
will be drunkards till the race be purged of them. We have therefore
no real choice between Temperance Reform by the abolition of drink,
and Temperance Reform by the elimination of the drunkard....
Which is the worse; that miserable drunkards shall bear wretched
children to a fate of starvation and neglect and early death, or of
subsequent drunkenness and crime, or that, by our deliberate act,
the procreation of children shall be forbidden them? We are on the
horns of a dilemma from which there is no escape.... But our time has
seen the labours of Darwin. We know now the great secret. Science
has given us knowledge and with it power. We have learnt that if we
labour for the individual alone, we shall surely fail; but that if
we make our sacrifice greater, if we labour for the race as well, we
must succeed. Let us then by all means seek to save the individual
drunkard; with all our power let us endeavour to make and keep him
sober; but let us strive also to eradicate the type; for, as I have
said, if we do it not quickly and with mercy, Nature will do it
slowly and with infinite cruelty.”

=Women and children first.=--The noble cry on a sinking ship is “women and children first.” This perhaps is a plea for the service of helplessness as such, though it might be equally warranted as a demand for the sacrifice of the present to the future. And assuredly the cry for a sinking society must also be “women and children first.” It is well if the cry be raised when the ship of state is not yet sinking, but only water-logged or alcohol-logged. Temperance legislation and the agitation for temperance reform are themselves in need of reform. Their appalling record of failure--for it is such a record--should help even the fanatic, one thinks, to accept the introduction of the eugenic idea as a new principle of life for the temperance cause. In the present state of custom and opinion, the teetotaler cannot force his own wise habits upon the vast majority who do not agree with him. If he has an infinite amount of energy and resources, let him spend as much of both as he pleases upon the sort of propaganda with which we are familiar: he will, by the hypothesis, still have an infinite amount of both available for the cause to which the principle of race-culture would direct him. If, however, his energy and resources are finite,--if, indeed, they are by no means excessive in proportion to the urgent task which the ideal of race-culture asks of him, then let him not fritter away a moment or a penny or a breath until he has achieved the process of salvage or salvation which is expressed in the phrase “women and children first.” More accurately, perhaps, our cry must be “parents and possible parents first,” and this for present practical purposes is equivalent to “women and children first.”

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:--

“It may be pointed out that the children of the drunkard are on the average less capable of citizenship on account of

“(a) The inheritance of nervous defect inherent in the parent.

“(b) Intra-uterine alcoholic poisoning in cases where the mother is
an inebriate.

“(c) Neglect, ill-feeding, accidents, blows, etc., which are
responsible on the one hand for much infant mortality, and
combined with the possible causes before mentioned, for the
ultimate production of adults defective both in body and mind.

“It would appear, then, that the drunkard, if not effectively restrained, conduces to the production of a defective race, involving a grave financial burden upon the sober portion of the community, to say nothing of higher considerations. It therefore seems to the Eugenics Education Society of extreme importance that some substantial effort should be made for the reform of existing drunkards, or the permanent control of the irreformable.

“Scientific warrant for the foregoing propositions is now to be found in no small abundance. Reference may be made, for instance, to the chapter on ‘Alcoholism and Human Degeneration,’ in Dr. W. C. Sullivan's recent work _Alcoholism_ (Nisbet, 1906). Dr. Sullivan quotes the results of more than a dozen observers in this and other countries, and special attention may be drawn to his own well-known study of the history of 600 children born of 120 drunken mothers. The works of Professor Forel of Zurich are widely known in this connection, notably _Die Sexuel Frage_, and _The Hygiene of Nerves and Mind_ (Translation, Murray, 1907). Parental alcoholism as a true cause of epilepsy in the offspring is now generally recognised. For numerous and detailed proofs from many sources reference may be made to page 210 of the last work named.

“It is not necessary, however, to go over the ground which has doubtless been covered by the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-minded.

“The existing laws comply to only a very small and almost negligible extent with the eugenic requirement. They only deal with (a) the very minute proportion of inebriates who can be induced to voluntarily sign away their liberty, and (b) those who are also criminal or all but hopeless and who have done harm already, either as individuals or in becoming parents. The third group of inebriates (c) not included in (a) or (b) constitutes the overwhelming majority of the whole. They are absolutely untouched by the present law, and further powers are urgently required to deal with them.

“Such legislation would be by no means without precedent, and may avail itself of the experience of several of our own colonies and various foreign countries. Such methods as compulsory control on petition, guardianship and so forth are in employment, for instance, in the Australian Commonwealth and New Zealand, California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, various cantons in Switzerland, Nova Scotia, etc.

“To sum up, the Society advocates the retention of the present law so far as classes (a) and (b) are concerned, but would most strongly urge the addition of powers to deal with that great majority of inebriates whom the present law does not touch.”

=The friends of alcohol.=--Those who defend the alcoholic poisoning of the race may be easily classified. Some few honestly stand for liberty. Like Archbishop Magee, they would rather see England free than England sober, not asking in what sense England drunken could be called free. Some are merely irritated by the temperance fanatic. Many fear that their personal comfort may be interfered with. But probably the overwhelming majority are concerned with their pockets. They live by this cannibal trade; by selling death and the slaughter of babies, feeble-mindedness and insanity, consumption and worse diseases, crime and pauperism, degradation of body and mind in a thousand forms, to the present generation and therefore to the future, the unconsulted party to the bargain. Their motto is “Your money and your life.” So powerful are they that most of them are frank. They form associations for their defence, and hold mass meetings at which they condemn any temperance measure that is before the country, “whilst ready to welcome any real temperance reform.” They demand adequate compensation: though, if they disgorged every farthing they possess, and devoted themselves body and soul for the rest of their lives to the human cause, they could never compensate us who are alive, let alone the dead or the unborn, for the human ruin on which they build their success. They build their palaces before our eyes; one of the largest and newest, not far from Piccadilly Circus, I often pass; but where most see only fine stone, the student of infant mortality, the lover of children, he who works and looks for the life of this world to come, sees the bodies of the children of men and is tempted to recall the curse of Joshua, “He shall lay the foundation thereof in his firstborn, and in his youngest son shall he set up the gates of it.”

=Alcoholic Imperialism.=--At least let the alcoholic party refrain from calling themselves Imperialists. Amongst them, for instance, is the “Imperial bard,” the “poet of empire,” he who has appealed to the “god of our fathers,” and who warns us lest it shall be said that “all our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre”: and appeals to deity--

“Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!”

This prophet of what some may think a blasphemous Imperialism gives his name to the association which frankly in this matter of alcohol stands for gold as against life. We are to beware lest “drunk with sight of power” we boast as do the “lesser breeds” to whom the “awful Hand” of God has not granted dominion: nor are we to put our trust in reeking tube and iron shard. We may freely call ourselves Imperialists, however, even though we should be numbered amongst those whom Ruskin, himself the son of a wine merchant, called the “vendors of death.” One wonders whether the “Lord God” exists that he can withhold his “awful Hand” at such a spectacle as this. If some amongst us are to win gold by the sale of this racial poison, and if it must be so, let them at least be consistent, and label themselves _the very littlest of little Englanders_, which they are. An alcoholic Imperialism is of the kind which no Empire can long survive.

Those of us whom such things as these make sick, and who yet, with true poets like Wordsworth, are proud of “the tongue that Shakespeare spake,” and who with him declare:--

“It is not to be thought of that the Flood
Of British freedom, which, to the open sea
Of the world's praise, from dark antiquity
Hath flowed, . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
That this most famous Stream in bogs and sands
Should perish; and to evil and to good
Be lost for ever”

--those of us who know that the foundations of any empire are living men and women, and that, _to quote Mr. Kipling_, “when breeds are in the making everything is worth while,” may wonder what process has been afoot that in three generations English poetry should pass from the sonnets of Wordsworth to “Duke's son, cook's son,” etc.; and may even at times, especially those of us who know what alcohol costs in life, feel a momentary recession of our faith that Great Britain need not now be writing the last page of her great history. Meanwhile, we read the controversy in Parliament and the press concerning alcohol. We see the cannibal cause of beer and spirits, which makes many widows and orphans every day,[74] represented, with an effrontery to which no parallel can ever be imagined, as the cause of widows and children, and we recall the lines which Wordsworth wrote rather more than a century ago:--

“How piteous, then, that there should be such dearth
Of knowledge; that whole myriads should unite
To work against themselves such fell despite;
Should come in frenzy and in drunken mirth,
Impatient to put out the only light
Of liberty that yet remains on earth!”