ssuredly 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 amo