THE MORAL STATUS OF ALCOHOL. 381 



be expended to achieve insignificant results. I can easily 

 understand that the Havelocks are reserving their pluck and 

 manhood for days of real strife. 1 can easily feign to myself 

 a gallant forty-eighth soliloquising something after the fol- 

 lowing fashion : ' Prize-shooting pooh! frivolity pooh! 

 we reserve ourselves for war. Wait till our shores are in- 

 vaded by beery Prussians, let loose from the German navy ; 

 then, O base revilers, shall the glory of cold water stand re- 

 vealed. We stoop not to make-believes !' 



Bearing testimony to the intrinsic worth of enthusiasm ; 

 giving total abstainers full credit, not for purity of motives 

 alone, but likewise for much practical good by them accom- 

 plished; it may be permitted to offer some kindly-meant 

 remonstrances to a certain weak point of their theory and 

 discipline. 



I would beg leave to note a certain weakness of abstainers' 

 ratiocination, a certain flaw in anti-alcoholic logic, whereby 

 the concession is made that total-abstinence people, in the 

 event of their being ill, and the general needs of their illness 

 prompting, may take alcoholic drinks in suitable proportion, 

 without peril to virtue, or incurring the imputation of a fall. 

 Alas, abstainers ! With this concession down goes your bar- 

 rier of reason utterly and for ever. What individual amongst 

 us, I wonder, can say to himself, under all circumstances and 

 at all times, 4 1 am wholly sound' ? Rendered in other lan- 

 guage, the teetotaller's concession to illness simply means 

 this, that it is permissible, good, and void of sin, for men 

 and women to drink alcoholic drinks when they seem to re- 

 quire them. Neither more nor less than sensible people who 

 are not teetotallers do now ; and have done from times imme- 

 morial. 



That under the excitation of alcohol the human organism 

 can put forth an excess of power, bodily as well as mental, no 

 unprejudiced and experienced person can deny. The circum- 

 stance is undoubted, though the explanation of it is open to 



