INDUSTRIAL DRINKING 321 



are supposed to believe that really tremendous drinking bene- 

 ficially affects their working powers : " We may take as a type for 

 our description the originally healthy workman who is engaged in 

 a trade that encourages, or at least allows, the habit of regular 

 drinking throughout the working day, and who probably goes in 

 also for an occasional convivial bout at the week-end or on special 

 festivals. After a period, longer or shorter according to the 

 intensity of his excesses, such a drinker will begin to show signs 

 of more or less persistent disorder, usually in the digestive and 

 nervous functions; he will be aware of a diminished and more 

 capricious appetite ; he will suffer from pain and oppression 

 referred to the region of the heart ; he will often have nausea or 

 vomiting on awaking in the morning ; his sleep will be disturbed 

 by disagreeable dreams, by attacks of muscular cramp, by electric 

 starts in the limbs ; more or less tremor in the hands and feet, 

 and in the tongue and muscles of the face, will be evident early in 

 the day. 



541. "As the intoxication continues, and by its own effects 

 supplies the motive for increasing excess, all these symptoms 

 become aggravated ; the morning sickness is regular, and is often 

 accompanied by the vomiting of blood ; the tremor is constant ; 

 nightmares and insomnia divide the hours of rest, and foreshadow 

 characters which will appear later in the full development of 

 delirium tremens." 1 



542. " As can readily be imagined from the amount of the 

 docker's average wages, the non-alcoholic part of his dietary is apt, 

 under any circumstances, to be deficient, and the money which he 

 spends on liquor leads necessarily to a further lowering of his 

 ordinary food allowance. Not only does his dinner money very 

 frequently go on beer before the meal time arrives, but even when 

 he brings his dinner with him from home he will often sell it for 

 a few pints to some more temperate comrade. This condition of 

 under- feeding contributes, of course, to the more rapid development 

 of the lesions of chronic alcoholism ; and it is usual for industrial 

 drinkers at this work to suffer from gastric catarrh and severe 

 nervous disorders before they reach the age of forty." 2 



543. " The industrial drinking habits which we have described 

 in the ordinary docker class reach a further degree of development 

 in some special varieties of waterside labour. We may take as an 

 instance the Thames Street fruit porters. Amongst these porters 

 the method of work and payment is this : The overseer takes on a 



1 Op. tit., pp. 49-50. * Op. tit., p. 8 1. 



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