INDUSTRIAL DRINKING 319 



ignored. It is admitted that the " worker who does his labour with 

 the help of alcohol is sure to have recourse to the drug for his 

 ideals of pleasure," l and that " exceptions to this rule are rare." 2 

 In other words, while it is admitted that after five or six o'clock 

 the worker drinks for the sake of enjoyment, it is assumed that 

 before that time he drinks from altruistic motives. With the 

 setting of the sun his sensations are supposed to undergo a 

 radical change. We are told, therefore, that, to wean workmen from 

 excessive drinking, nothing more is necessary than to convince 

 them that the habit is injurious to health and work. Thereupon 

 industrial drinking, the only harmful form of indulgence, will cease. 3 

 538. The unconscious humour of this surprising hypothesis is 



1 Op. cit., p. 62. 2 Op. cit., p. 87. 



3 The hypothesis under discussion is interesting as a type of, and is really not 

 much more absurd than a great deal that has been written on the problem of, 

 alcoholism since the theory of alcoholic evolution was formulated. For example, 

 if we seek to demonstrate the existence of alcoholic selection and its corollary 

 evolution, plenty of people will at once inform an astonished public that universal 

 intoxication is advocated as a cure for national drunkenness. If we protest that 

 we advocate no such thing and that we would object to it as strongly as to 

 universal disease, the reply is that it follows logically from our opinions. It is 

 quite useless to indicate to intelligences of this order that their logical conclusions 

 are not necessarily ours, especially when we have strongly and categorically 

 repudiated them ; that unpleasant truths are not the less true for being unpleasant, 

 and that the only rational way of refuting opinions they dislike is not to make 

 mis-statements but to break the actual chain of alleged facts and the inferences 

 drawn from them. It may be thought that I am unfair in saying that the drunken 

 British workman is described as sacrificing himself on the altar of duty. But 

 clearly, if drinking makes a man feel better, if it creates in him a " sense of well- 

 being," if his dislike of labour is lessened thereby, he is susceptible to its charm. 

 The hypothesis that men who vary in all known characters do not vary in this one 

 particular of receiving pleasure from alcoholic indulgence is too grotesque for 

 serious discussion. It has been trumped up by people unfamiliar with the facts 

 of biology to meet the exigencies of the moment. Therefore, if it be said that 

 men drink because of the sense of well-being which the act creates in them, then, 

 since it is admitted that alcohol is a considerable cause of ill-health, incapacity, 

 and death, that poison must tend to eliminate especially people who are most 

 susceptible to its charm. It follows that the hypothesis under discussion, which 

 is supposed by its supporters to controvert the theory of alcoholic selection, can 

 do so only when it premises that men at work drink alcohol, not because they 

 like it, not because it creates a sense of well-being, but from some other cause. 

 The cause alleged is a superstition, said to be derived from the Middle Ages and 

 still prevalent amongst workmen, that an amount of drinking, which anyone not 

 a lunatic would know to be injurious, is an aid to labour. Apart from its amazing 

 inferences, the volume from which I have quoted is an excellent work. It is 

 well and clearly written, contains a mass of useful statistics, and proves if proof 

 be needed quite conclusively that, other things equal, men drink most when 

 their opportunities are greatest, and that the man who drinks to excess all day 

 long suffers, as a rule, more than the man who drinks only in the evening. 



