we
have to deal. Above all, do women as individuals depend for their
happiness upon the selves of men, as we have suggested.

Now if there be anything certain about the action of alcohol upon the
brain, it is that it degrades the quality of the self. Much of the
cruder pathology of alcohol is open to doubt. A great many of the
supposed degenerative changes in nerve-cells, which were attributed to
it and thought to be irrevocable, are now interpreted otherwise. Chronic
alcoholism is looked upon by such foremost students as Dr. F. W. Mott,
less as a disease due to organic changes produced in the brain than as a
chronic functional derangement due to the continued action of a poison.
This newer interpretation of chronic alcoholism has the very important
practical corollary of encouraging us to the belief, which is frequently
justifiable, that if the chronic intoxication ceases, the individual may
completely or all but completely recover, as would not be the case if
the fine structure of his brain had been actually destroyed. The recent
modification of our views on this subject has, however, only served to
render clearer our understanding of the mental symptoms of alcoholism.
Here is a drug which poisons the organ of the mind. The action of a
single dose persists for a far longer period than used to be supposed,
and thus we now know that in the great majority of civilized men
everywhere, the nervous system, which is the home of the self, is
continuously under the influence of alcohol.

That influence, as we have said, consistently shows itself in a
degradation of the quality of the self. The poison deranges first the
latest and highest products of evolution; it beheads a man, as we may
say, in thin slices from above downwards. Beginning as it does with the
most human, and only at the very last attacking the most animal part of
our nervous constitution, it is essentially the bestializer, save only
that the alcoholized human being is much lower than the beast, on the
general principle, _Corruptio optimi pessima_--the corruption of the
best is the worst.

Now wherever alcohol is consumed women have to pay the penalty for its
daily deterioration in the human scale of the men with whom they live;
nor need any reader of even the smallest experience require any writer's
assurance that in vast numbers of such cases the woman suffers more than
the man. He has its moments of compensation, inadequate though they be;
she has none.