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 If the manhood is withdrawn and she is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 u