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 amongst women. We know
that in either sex a single bout of drinking, say once a week on
Saturday night, may leave the individual little worse, may injure health
quite inappreciably, if at all; it may not interfere with his work, and
may even be of small economic importance. In such a coal-mining county
as Durham, for instance, where alcohol cannot be drunk in association
with work because the workman and his fellows know that the safety of
their lives will not permit it, we find a huge proportion of arrests for
drunkenness, and it might be supposed that in this most drunken county
in England we should find the highest proportion of permanent
consequences of alcoholism.
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