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ALCOHOLISM
A CHAFIER IN SOCIAL PATHOLOGY
W. C. SULLIVAN, M.D.
MEDICAL OFFICER IN H.M. PRISON SERVICE
^ OF THE
UNIVERSITY
OF
JAMES NISBET & CO., LIMITED
21 BERNERS STREET
1906
505°
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PRINTED BY ADLABD AND SON
LONDON AND DOHKINQ.
TO
SIE EVELYN KUGGLES-BEISE, K.C.B.,
Chairman of th9 Prison Commission,
UNDER WHOSE ENLIGHTENED ADMINISTRATION
SCIENCE AND HUMANITY HAVE BECOME THE GUIDING
PRINCIPLES OF THE ENGLISH PENAL SYSTEM,
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PREFACE
^HB object of the following essay is to give^ in as
concise a form as is compatible with clearness
and accuracy, a summary of the fundamental data of
the drink question, having regard more particularly
to the connection of alcoholism with industrial con-
ditions. The predominant importance of this latter
aspect of intemperance is, as a rule, very inadequately
recognised in the discussion of the liquor problem in
this country ; and in the practical schemes that most
commend themselves to the temperance reformer
little, if any, account is ever taken of it. In this fact
lies the raison d'etre of the present volume, which, it
need hardly be added, is designed merely to point
out the omission, and has no pretension to repair it.
In dealing with so vast a subject it would obviously
be impossible, without burdening the text with notes,
to give exact references to all the writers whose
works have been laid under contribution. In most
instances, however, where statements are made on
the authority of individual observers, it will be found
that the source of information has been indicated
sufficiently to enable it to be readily traced in the
^ Bibliographie des Alkoholismus ' of Abderkalden
VI
(Berlin, 1904: Urban und Schwarzenberg), which
is familiar to most students of inebriety. To that
invaluable work, and to the treatises of Baer and
of Grotjahn, I have to express my deep obliga-
tions. For the material embodied in the historical
sketch of alcoholism I have been chiefly indebted to
Bertholot's 'Histoire de Chimie/ to Cunningham's
* History of English Industry and Commerce/ and to
Leck/s works. In the chapters on the physiological
action of alcohol, on drunkenness, and on chronic
alcoholism, the 'Psychologische Studien' of Kraepelin,
Maudsley's 'Pathology of Mind,' and Lancereaux'
articles in Raige-Delorme's ' Dictionnaire de Medecine '
have been of special assistance. And, of course,, in
dealing with the social and industrial conditions of
the labouring classes Mr. Charles Booth's monu-
mental work has been constantly consulted.
For valuable advice and assistance in revising the
proofs I have to thank my friend and colleague,
Dr. J. H. Parker Wilson.
Finally, I have to express my special indebtedness
to the Prison Commissioners, who have allowed me to
make free use of the opportunities afforded by my
official position. It is on the study of the human docu-
ments of alcoholism which have thus been brought
within my reach that this essay is mainly based.
W. C. SULLIVAN.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER VAQE
I. — Introductory and Historical ... 1
— II. — Physiological Action op Alcohol . . 15
:yIII. — Drunkenness 37
^Y. — Chronic Alcoholism 45
V. — Social Causes of Intemperance . . 57
VI. — Industrial Drinking . ... 76
VII. — Factors of Industrial Drinking . . 113
Social Effects of Alcoholism . . 133
*VIII. — Alcoholism and Suicide . . . .137
^IX. — Alcoholism and Crime . . . . 153
'- X. — Alcoholism and Insanity. . . .170
XI. — Alcoholism and Human Degeneration . 182
XII. — Conclusions 199
ALCOHOLISM :
A CHAPTEE IN SOCIAL PATHOLOGY.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY AND HISTORICAL.
The word " alcoholism ^^ is used currently in two
meanings : in the narrower sense, to indicate the
intoxication of the individual organism by alcohol,
being then further distinguished as acute or chronic ;
and in a wider sense, without qualification, as a
synonym of the drink question, to indicate the group
of problems which depend on the prevalence of
alcoholic excess in a community.
The use of a single word to subserve these two
meanings, though liable at times to cause some
misunderstanding, has the very decided advantage
that, as the original connection of the term is with
individual pathology, it keeps constantly before the
mind the close relationship of the individual to the
social aspects of alcoholism. And this is, in the
study of the drink question, a matter of the first
importance ; for the beginning and the end of that
2 ALCOHOLISM.
question, the causes which lead to alcoholic excess
and the effects which follow from it, alike find their
explanation in the state of organic function in the
drinker. The origin of alcoholism is in the power
that alcohol possesses of inducing certain modifica-
■ tions in that state ; and the social conditions which
lead to the various forms of excess are operative in
the long run through their influence in making such
modifications desirable. And, as the immediate
action of alcohol on the organism thus accounts for
the causation of excess, so its more remote effects
, shown in the tissue changes of chronic intoxication
I are the source of those morbid impulses and those
\ degradations of function which are the essential
.' elements in the graver social results of intemper-
ance.
For this reason the study of alcohol and alcoholism
in the individual is the proper and natural introduc-
tion to the study of alcoholism as a problem of
sociology. That is the plan which it is proposed to
follow in this essay. The first portion will be
devoted to an analysis of the physiological action of
alcohol, and more especially of its influence on mental
and muscular function, and to a discussion of the
acute and chronic intoxications and their influence
on conduct. The facts set out in this part of the
inquiry will then be taken as a guide in the second
and third parts of the book, the former dealing with
the social and industrial causes of alcoholism, and
the latter with its relation to the different social
phenomena in whose origin it plays a more or less
important part.
INTRODUCTORY AND HISTORICAL. 3
Before entering, however, on the proper matter of
our inquiry, it will be desirable to recall very briefly
something of the history of the subject, and more
particularly to indicate the chief phases in the gradual
development by which intemperance, from being
little more than an expression of individual vice, and
as such mainly interesting the moral teacher, has
grown to the magnitude of the grave problem which
to-day confronts society in every civilised country.
A very summary account of the essential facts in this
evolution will form the subject of the present chapter.
Alcohol, by which ordinarily is meant ethylic
alcohol, is the distinctive constituent of what are
known as alcoholic drinks, and is a product of the
fermentation of saccharine fluids.
As may readily be imagined from the ease with
which the process of fermentation can come about in
nature, the preparation of intoxicating beverages
from fruit juices is practised by most savage peoples,
and its knowledge was one of the earliest acquire-
ments of the race. " The palafits or Lake Dwellings
of Clairvaux and of Switzerland show that during
the neolithic epoch the inhabitants of central Europe
possessed already a fermented drink prepared from
raspberries and from mulberries. The investigation
of the palafits of Bourget (Savoie) and of various
stations round the Alps proves that the use of this
raspberry or mulberry wine continued during the
bronze age. On the southern slopes of the Alps the
palafits intermediate between the prehistoric and the
protohistoric show the use of another fermented
liquor, dogberry wine. Finally, a little more to the
4 ALCOHOLISM.
south in the terramares of the plain of the Po, going
back to the first bronze age, we ascertain the exist-
ence of the true wine of the grape '' (Gr. de Mortillet) .
Whether the vine and the art of wine-making
came from East to West, or, as more recent research
seems rather to indicate, travelled from West to
East, they are found at a very early period in the
civilisations of antiquity, associated with legends
suggestive of remote and Divine origin, as in the
Hellenic myth which represents the vine as a gift
of Zeus to Dionysus.
In antiquity the use of wine, or of the artificial
wines that replaced it where the culture of the grape
was impracticable, seems to have been mainly con-
vivial. In civilisations low in the scale of civilisa-
tion there was then, as now, a strong tendency to
excess, while in societies which had reached a higher
level of refinement the virtue of moderation was at
all events esteemed, if it was not always practised.
Drunkenness, no doubt, appears to have been neither
very rare nor very strongly reprobated even in the
best times of Greek civilisation ; but its grosser forms
were at least discouraged by tradition ; the drinking
of undiluted wine was accounted a barbarism, and
though intoxication was often a result of the sym-
posium, it was not its aim. And to some extent, at
all events, the Romans before the decadence followed
the same traditions.
The decline of the empire, however, and the
dominance of the barbarians of the North brought
coarser habits into vogue, and drunkenness of a
bestial sort became the ideal of pleasure in wine.
INTEODUCTORY AND HISTORICAL. 5
Evidences of this grossness of taste are to be
found in abundance in the social records of Western
Europe throughout the Middle Ages; and nowhere
are they met with more frequently than in the history
of this country. Already at the time of the Conquest
the drunken habits of the Anglo-Saxons were noto-
riouSj and the Norman invaders, though by contrast
they gained a reputation for relative sobriety, do not
appear, if we may judge from the references of con-
temporary critics in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, to have lagged very far behind the subject
race in Bacchanalian prowess.
But although in the writers of this time, both in
England and elsewhere, we read very often of Gar-
gantuan excesses, and may even in isolated cases be
able to recognise descriptions of alcoholic disease,
it appears clear that on the whole, at all events
amongst the masses of the population, mediaeval
drinking, as would accord with its purely convivial
origin, must have been essentially of an intermittent
and occasional character.
And to this we may perhaps attribute, at least in
part, the fact that despite the frequent and vehement
rebukes which it drew from the moralists and religious
writers of the period, this general intemperance did
not apparently lead to any restrictive or penal
measures. It is true, of course, that in a relatively
rudimentary state of society and with a low standard
of manners we should hardly look for any elaborate
legislation to promote sobriety ; but it is, nevertheless,
highly probable that had there been any wide de-
velopment of alcoholism among the common people.
6 ALCOHOLISM.
such as we meet with later in history, it would
have been quickly recognised as an evil calling for
legal repression.
We may, accordingly, conclude with a fair measure
of assurance that in this country up to the time
of the Tudors occasional drunkenness was the main
part of intemperance, and that the habitual use of
intoxicants as an aid in labour, which is the chief ■
factor in modern alcoholism, had not yet come into
vogue ; or, as we may express it by the aid of two
terms, which are to some extent self-explanatory,
and which, so far as they need definition, we shall
have to discuss in detail later on, we may say that
mediaeval drinking was purely convivial, and not
industrial.
"" It was not, in fact, until the break up of feudalism,
and the reorganisation of society on the capitalistic
basis, that the necessary conditions for this graver
form of intemperance came into being.
And it so happened that those latter changes
coincided with an event which may very well have
contributed to bring into prominence the attractions
of alcohol as an industrial stimulant. This was the
vulgarisation of the process of distilling spirits, which
the Arabs, probably in the thirteenth century, dis-
covered by applying to wine the methods and appa-
ratus of the Grjeco-Egyptian alchemists. The striking
properties of the aqua ardens led at once to enthusi-
astic views of its value as a drug : Arnold, of
Villanuova,in his treatise *^de Conservanda Juventute^
(ca. 1309) hails it metaphorically as the aqua vitas or
elixir of life.
INTRODUCTORY AND HISTORICAL. 7
Its preparation soon ceased to be a secret of the
laboratory ; and by the end of the fifteenth century
the manufacture of brandy had become an important
branch of industry in the wine countries. In the
following century improvements in the technical
methods, and more particularly the utilisation of
fermented grain as a source of alcohol — a discovery
of the German Libavius — caused a rapid extension
of the trade ; and as spirits could now be produced
at a cost that brought them within the reach of the
common people, their employment as a stimulant in
labour quickly came into vogue^. • In the middle of
the fifteenth century, indeed, brandy was supplied
for this purpose to the workers in the Hungarian
mines ; and some years later we hear of its distri-
bution to the English troops serving in the Low
Countries.
This latter fact is of special interest from our
present point of view; for it is to the drinking
tradition brought home by these soldiers that Camden
attributes the growth of intemperance which was a
prominent characteristic of the closing years of the
sixteenth and the early part of the seventeenth
century in England. Presumably, however, their
example, if it had any real influence, must have
acted mainly as a stimulus to the national beer-
drinking, for it seems improbable that they introduced
any extensive use of spirits; English distilleries,
according to Lecky, were insignificant until the time
of the Revolution, and French brandies were, of
course, too highly priced for popular consumption.
In any case, however, it is unnecessary to assume that
8 ALCOHOLISM.
this extraneous influence had anything like the im-
portance which Camden assigns to it ; it seems much
more likely that the increase of intemperance to
which he refers was connected with the natural
growth of industrial drinking consequent on the new
economic conditions which^ as contemporary legislation
shows us, were emerging at this time. Already,
earlier in the century, as we learn from an enactment
of 1555, the weaving industry was passing into the
capitalistic phase, and complaints were being made
of evil clothiers "engrossing the looms into their
hands and possession, and letting them out at such
exorbitant rents that the poor artificers are not able
to maintain themselves." And in other trades the
same transforming influences were at work.
These signs of the coming of the modern industrial
system were accompanied also by a very significant
change in the legal attitude towards intemperance,
which was now treated for the first time as a serious
social evil. The Licensing Law of Edward VI
(1551), ushering in the long series of similar enact-
ments which stretches down to our own day, was
designed, according to its preamble, to remove '^ the
intolerable hurts and troubles to the Commonwealth
of this realm which do daily grow and increase
through such abuses and disorders as are had and
used in common ale-houses and . . . tippling houses."
We know, however, that convivial drunkenness was
a fairly common trait in the manners of the people
long before this date ; and that though it was often
severely censured by the moralists, it had not been
found necessary to make it the object of restrictive
INTRODUCTORY AND HISTORICAL. 9
legislation in an age that was by no means chary of
interference with liberty. It seems reasonable, there-
fore, to suspect that the new attitude betokened by
this and other subsequent laws must have been
determined by some considerable change in the
circumstances or the character of the national in-
temperance, whereby its possibilities as a source of
danger to the community were either increased or at
all events rendered more conspicuous. And such a
change might naturally be looked for in the growth
of the labouring class — whose discontents are so
prominent a feature in the history of the' sixteenth
century ; the conditions under which this class lived
were of a kind peculiarly apt, on the one hand, to
further the substitution of industrial drinking for
piire convivial excess ; and, on the other, to aggravate
the more obvious consequences, direct and indirect, /^
of the increasing intemperance. And the subsequent ^
course of events fully confirms this view. Thus
throughout the seventeenth century, with the de-
velopment and extension of the capitalistic system,
the evidences of a widespread alcoholism become
increasingly frequent and pronounced. And the in-
dustrial origin of this growing intemperance is
strikingly indicated by the fact that the classes of
the population in which the habits of excess reached
their highest degree were exactly, as at the present \ "^
time, the unskilled labourers of the sea-ports. The
worst oifenders, for instance, in the way of drunken-
ness and disorderly conduct dealt with by the
summary jurisdiction of the Commissioners of Revenue
under the Commonwealth were the Thames watermen
10 ALCOHOLISM.
and the porters and carmen of the quays, whose
representatives to-day are the class most addicted to
alcoholism in the labouring population of London.
The practice of industrial drinking was not, however,
confined to the manual workers, for even the Puritan
divines of the time were said to assign "the great
pains they were to take or had taken in preaching^'
as an excuse for their liberal potations in the vestry.
Towards the end of this century a further im-
pulse was given to the national intemperance by
the liquor policy of the Government of the Whig
Revolution, which made distillation practically free,
and so led to the partial substitution of spirits for ale
as the ordinary beverage of the people. This change
was followed by an enormous increase of alcoholism ;
and in the first half of the eighteenth century the
results of intemperance, in disease, crime, and pau-
perism, were appallingly evident in London and in
smaller towns. According to Smollett^s well-known
description, the gin-shops in the Metropolis hung
out painted boards inviting people to get drunk for
a penny, and dead drunk for twopence, and offering
them straw for nothing. There were computed to
be 20,000 of these shops within the Bills of Mor-
tality; and it was said that 100,000 persons in
London lived on practically nothing but liquor.
It seems probable, however, that the intemper-
ance of this period, though owing its wild excesses
to the special opportunities offered by the free trade
in spirits, was essentially no more than an aggra-
vation of a regular practice of industrial drinking.
This may be inferred from the fact that its evil
INTRODUCTOKY AND HISTORICAL. 11
effects were chiefly observed in the proletariat of
the towns. The petition of the Middlesex magis-
trates, for example, in support of the Gin Act of
1736 expressly singles out journeymen and appren-
tices as the classes particularly addicted to this
sort of excess.
And from other references in contemporary writers
it is sufficiently clear that even at that early stage of
the modern industrial system the use of alcohol,
whether in the form of beer or spirits, as a stimulant
for muscular work, was firmly established. Frank-
lin's account, for instance, of the habits of the Lon-
don printers about 1724 is a perfect epitome of the
theory and practice of industrial drinking {vide
Chap. YI, p. 102).
On the essential causes of this form of alcoholism
none of the many changes in liquor taxation or in
the Licensing Laws, which were made in the course
of the century, could be expected to have very much
effect. The worst evils of the earlier Hanoverian
period were, it is true, abated in a considerable de-
gree by the legislation of the Pelham ministry, and
the overt intemperance of the country was doubt-
less thereby brought back to something nearer its
old level ; but, despite this improvement in manners,
the tradition of industrial drinking, in which lay the
danger of the future, persisted unchanged, and its
fostering conditions continued to develop.
Up to this period, however, these conditions were
absolutely and relatively very limited in their force
and in their extension. In 1740 the population of
the whole country was only a little over 6,000,000,
12 ALCOHOLISM.
and it had reached this figure at a comparatively
slow rate of progress. The people were for the
most part engaged in rural occupations, and the
chief industries were mainly domestic in character
and primitive in method. Roads were bad, canals
did not exist, industrialism was still in its infancy.
The second half of the century saw a total trans-
formation of this state of things. A rapid succession
of discoveries in science and industry revolutionised
the conditions of work. Machinery drove out manual
skill, and around the centres of motor power grew
up big manufacturing towns, where the workers were
gathered into factories for the long hours of their
monotonous labour, and herded for the rest of the
time in vile slums to sleep, feed, and procreate. By
the end of the Napoleonic wars the population had
risen under these conditions to over 10,000,000; in
1821 it amounted to 14,300,000. In the large centres
of industry in the north, and in the great seaports of
the north-west the increase was enormous.
This development of the factory system, reinforced
by the conditions of slum life, naturally brought
about a rapid extension of industrial drinking, which
was the more serious in its results in that it affected
both sexes and all ages. Of its character and degree
we find ample evidence in the first half of the last
century. Thus Dr. Kay, writing of the state of the
cotton operatives in Manchester in 1832, after re-
ferring to their bad and insufficient diet, in which
potatoes formed a large element, adds that it was a
frequent practice for these workers to use spirits in
tea as a stimulant during the hours of labour. And
INTRODUCTORY AND HISTORICAL. 13
another observer at about the same date, Mr. R.
Gregg, describing this class, states that " the per-
nicious practice of mixing a large proportion of
spirits in every cup they take prevails to an incon-
ceivable extent among the manufacturing popula-
tion at every age and in both sexes." And he adds
that opium was also largely used as a stimulant in
the same conditions. The overworked and brutally
used children in the factories adopted the same habits,
and it was said that gin was dealt out to them at the
drinking shops in special measures suited to their
tender years.
With this abuse of alcohol as an industrial stimu-
lant there went, of course, a corresponding develop-
ment of convivial excess, and such leisure as the
brutalised labourer enjoyed he spent, not unnaturally,
in getting drunk as often and as profoundly as his
means would allow him.
It is from this time that we may date the full
growth of the tradition of industrial drinking
amongst the English working classes, which, as we
shall see later in this essay, is still dominant in most
of the forms of skilled and unskilled labour at the
present day. And here, accordingly, on the threshold
of our own times, we may bring to a close this brief
review of the history of the drink question in England.
The social and economic changes which have since
occurred, numerous and far-reaching as they doubt-
less are, have not altered the fundamental factors
of the problem with which we have to deal. The
circumstances of the manual worker are, it is true,
vastly better in our time than in the palmy days of
14 ALCOHOLISM.
the industrial revolution, and his alcoholic tendencies
have no doubt shown some corresponding modifi-
cation. The higher wages, the cheaper food, the
shorter hours of work under better sanitary con-
ditions, the restrictions on female and juvenile labour,
the increased stringency of the Employers' Liability
Acts, and other influences of the same kind, which
have wrought so marked an improvement in the status
of the working classes, have necessarily weakened in
some measure the forces that make for industrial
alcoholism.
In their essential character, however, these forces
have undergone but little change. The drinking
habits created by their more vigorous operation in
the past can still find a sanction for their persistence
in the attenuated activity of the same causes in the
present. And it is, in fact, as we hope to show in
the course of this inquiry, through the constant in-
fluence of these causes in keeping alive the drinking
traditions that industrial alcoholism has maintained
its hold on this country, and that despite the general
progress in manners and in national prosperity,
despite the efforts of legislation and of moral and
religious enthusiasm, the national intemperance is
still in the position of a grave and urgent social
problem.
CHAPTER II.
THE PHYSIOLOGICAL ACTION OF ALCOHOL.
Ethylic alcoliol is the essential constituent of all
the alcoholic beverages, and for our present purposes
may be regarded as the sole important agent in the
production of their immediate and remote effects on
the organism.
Of course, in the various forms of liquor this
alcohol is associated with numerous other bodies,
many of which have distinctive modes of action ;
but for the most part the proportions in which these
bodies are present are so small that their influence
may be treated as practically negligeable. There
are, it is true, some exceptions to this general rule ;
it is notorious, for example, that the deleterious
effects of absinthe are due even more to the con-
vulsive poison of the essential oil of wormwood
than to the alcohol which is its vehicle; and a
similar remark would apply to other aperitifs^
such as vermouth and bitter. Again, when the
rectification of trade spirit has been imperfectly
carried out, it is quite possible that the amount of
the heavier alcohols which remain may be so large
as to modify considerably the type of the intoxication.
16 ALCOHOLISM.
Under existing circumstances, however, at all
events in this country, such exceptional cases are
relatively few, so that in a general survey of the
question they may be left out of account without
risk of material error, and it may be assumed that
we have to do with ethylic alcohol alone, and that
the only difference between the several alcoholic
beverages is a difference in dilution. It is for the
sake of the ethylic alcohol which they contain that
these beverages are taken, and all the main effects
of their use and abuse can be got from ethylic
alcohol in its purest form. There are only a few
points on which this assumption needs to be qualified,
and these it will be more convenient to discuss
incidentally later on.
The present chapter, therefore, will deal ex-
clusively with the action of ethylic alcohol, and more
particularly with its influence on nervous and mus-
cular function, and, in relation to the latter, with
its value as a food. Its effects on other functions
are, from our point of view, of subordinate interest,
and concern us only or chiefly in so far as they are
connected with and enter into its action on the brain.
Its stimulation of the heart, for instance, is im-
portant, not so much in itself, as because it is one
element in the general exaltation of motor and
secretory function which alcohol produces, and
which is, indeed, the physical counterpart of the
characteristic sense of well-being that is the most
notable and familiar effect of drinking. And this
applies also in a large measure to its influence in
promoting the muscular and secretory activity of
PHYSIOLOGICAL ACTION OF ALCOHOL. 17
the stomach, though in this case the direct value
that alcohol thereby acquires as a condiment also
plays an important role in determining its habitual
use by the classes of the population who have to
live mainly on unpalatable or insufficient food.
Broadly speaking, however, it is only with its action
on the nervous system and with its influence on
volitional muscular work that we need occupy our-
selves when considering the physiological basis of
alcoholism.
On these questions a good deal of light has been
thrown within recent years by the application to
their study of exact experimental methods, and the
new material so acquired will form the chief part
of the data for this discussion. Of course, it will
be readily understood that the conclusions to which
this sort of evidence can lead are for the most part
merely probable. The questions at issue are of such
complexity that it is very difficult to devise experi-
ments for their solution that will not be open to
many and grave fallacies ; the effects of slight dif-
ferences in technique or of peculiarities in indi-
vidual reaction are likely to show on an exaggerated
scale, and hence to produce discordant results ; and
even when the results are agreed on their inter-
pretation will still depend on physiological principles
regarding which the sharpest and most radical
differences of opinion prevail.
None the less, when due allowance has been made
for these difficulties, the experimental evidence to
which we refer does permit us to formulate fairly
positive views on some points ; on others it enables us
2
Y
18 ALCOHOLISM.
at least to establish with a moderate degree of assur-
ance the balance of probabilities ; while even on the
most obscure questions it is of considerable value in
helping to define the issues. And its importance in
all these ways will, no doubt, be decidedly increased
when wider experience shall have fixed the best tech-
nical methods, and when, above all, by the multiplica-
tion of experiments, we are enabled to form some idea
of the range and character of individual variation in
susceptibility to alcohol. This is a point of the first
importance, for nothing has been better established
by these investigations — in agreement, indeed, with
common experience — than the fact that the amount,
direction, and duration of the influence that alcohol
exerts on the several functions differs enormously
in different persons. For that reason we cannot be
very sure of our position until further research has
shown us, not only what is beyond doubt the
dominant type of reaction to the drug in respect of^
each mode of function, but also what is the relative
importance numerically of the different groups which
exhibit a departure from that type. Pending the
fulfilment of these conditions, which will obviously
demand much time and labour, we have to bear in
mind that many of our conclusions must retain some-
thing of a provisional character.
Having said this much by way of preface, we may
now pass to the consideration of the experimental
evidence, and we shall first deal with that which
relates to the action of alcohol on the simple mental
processes. This question has been investigated more
particularly by Professor Kraepelin and his pupils of
PHYSIOLOGICAL ACTION OF ALCOHOL. 19
the Heidelberg school, and their results have very
generally been confirmed by observers elsewhere.
The methods employed in these experiments are
those customary in psycho-physical research, and
are fully described in the special treatises of ex-
perimental psychology. Essentially the mode of
procedure consists in ascertaining the speed and
character of various mental exercises, and then
observing how far they are modified by the admi-
nistration to the subject under examination of
various doses of alcohol. The operations include
the measurement of reaction time — i. e. the length
of time between the application of a sensory stimulus
to the individual under examination and his reply
by a preconcerted signal ; the estimation of the
acuteness of perception, as shown, for instance, by
the recognition of letters, syllables, or figures pre-
sented to the sight for very brief periods of time ;
the determination of the rapidity and accuracy dis-
played in such exercises as reading aloud, adding
rows of figures, committing figures to memory, and
so forth.
By these researches certain facts of alcoholic
action seem to have been clearly established, which
we may summarise in the following propositions :
(1) Below a minimal dose, which varies within
wide limits in different individuals, and possibly to
some extent in the same individual under different
circumstances, alcohol has no effect on psychic
processes.
(2) Above this minimal dose its effects vary in
kind and degree with the amount of alcohol taken,
20 ALCOHOLISM.
(3) The most constant effect of moderate doses is
a stimulation of psycho-motor function, so that
voluntary movements are easier and quicker (Krae-
pelin, Eiidin) . For this reason simple reaction-time
is generally shortened, the greater rapidity of its
motor part overbalancing the prolongation of its
sensory period ; motor images predominate in the
association of ideas, so that words are connected by
similarity of speech processes rather than by simila-
rity of sense ; and exercises, such as reading and
writing, are done with increased speed. In resistant
subjects this psycho-motor stimulation may be the
only perceptible effect after even fairly large doses of
alcohol. Riidin, for instance, in four individuals who
served as subjects for his experiments, found one on
whom a dose equivalent to 90—100 grammes of abso-
lute alcohol (as much as would be contained in four
pints of ale) produced no result beyond a quickening
of the motor speech associations.
(4) This psycho-motor excitation lasts only a short
time, and is succeeded by depression. Kraepelin
with doses of 50 grms. absolute alcohol found that
the phase of stimulation lasted about half an hour.
With larger doses the duration of the phase is shorter,
the paralytic effect of the drug showing itself earlier.
On the other hand, at all events in some instances,
small doses seem capable of causing stimulation with
no appreciable degree of subsequent depression.
(5) The motor stimulation is directly perceived by
the individual, and is felt as a sense of increased
energy. This feeling is the origin of the common
belief in the strengthening action of alcohol, and is
PHYSIOLOGICAL ACTION OF ALCOHOL. 21
thus one of the chief causes of the general use of
alcoholic liquors.
(6) On sensory functions the action of alcohol is
depressant. This has been shown clearly with regard /
to simple tactile, visual, and auditory impressions
and is apparent also in the case of muscular sensations
in the diminished accuracy of fine motor adjustments.
(7) The intellectual processes which can be tested
show a similar reaction. Very moderate doses of al- f
cohol decrease speed and accuracy in adding figures, in /
committing numbers to memory, in logically associat-
ing ideas, and so forth.
(8) The depression of sensory and intellectual
function seems generally to last a considerable time,
probably as long as twenty-four hours in some in-
dividuals (Wlassek, Riidin). In more resistant sub-
jects it is inuch briefer (Partridge). In cases where
the effect of the drug is fairly persistent there is,
with daily doses, a summation of the depressant
action, which will then be perceptible even some days
after its use has been discontinued.
(9) The subjects are not conscious of the impair-
ment of sensation and reasoning, but, on the contrary,
believe that their mental keenness is increased.
(10) Owing to the dulling of sensation, disagree-
able impressions are less felt, and this fact contributes,
with the stimulation of motor and secretory activity,
to give rise to that feeling of well-being which is the
most signal and constant effect of alcohol*-<=:r/
The excitant action of alcohol on psycho-motor
function, which is one of the salient results brought
out by the investigations we have just discussed, is,
22 ALCOHOLISM.
of course, one, and, as we shall see later on, probably
the most important element in its influence on
muscular work. This influence, however, is so com-
plex, and the several modes of alcoholic action that
go to form it are so intimately connected, that it is
more convenient to deal with the question as a whole,
and in most of the experimental work on the matter
this method has, in fact, been followed.
The bulk of the work to which we refer has been
done with one of the many forms of ergograph, an
instrument invented by Mosso for the study of
fatiofue. In this instrument the arm and hand of
the subject under examination are encased in a rigid
frame, so that no portion of the limb can be moved
except the middle finger, to which a weight is sus-
pended. A pen attached to the tip of the finger is
put in contact with a recording cylinder revolving at
a regular known speed, and the subject contracts the
finger at a fixed rhythm, each contraction being
accordingly registered on the cylinder by a corre-
sponding elevation in the tracing. It is found that
when the contractions succeed one another at a shorter
interval than ten seconds they decrease regularly in
range until a point of exhaustion is reached where
the finger ceases altogether to move; a complete
tracing of this kind is termed an '' ergogram.^'
Now, the characters of this ergographic tracing,
which are fairly constant in the same individual
under the same conditions, show certain modifications
when these conditions are altered, as they are notably
by the administration of various drugs. By giving,
therefore, various doses of alcohol and observing the
PHYSIOLOGICAL ACTION OF ALCOHOL. 23
resulting alterations in the amount and character of
the work done as shown in the ergographic tracing,
it is possible to gain some notion of the extent and
manner in which the drug influences muscular effort.
Of course, as in other psycho-physical inquiries,
diversity of method and the personal equation of the
subject act as disturbing factors, so that on several
points there are conflicts of evidence which it is
difficult to reconcile. On the main facts, however,
there is a very fair measure of agreement, or, at all
events, a sufficient preponderance of testimony to
warrant a definite conclusion.
This will be clearly seen in the following summary
of the more important investigations dealing with
the matter :
One of the first of these inquiries was carried out
by Lombard Warren, who found that a dose of 32 c.c.
of whisky, or its alcoholic equivalent in the form of
claret, increased the power to do volitional muscular
work. This effect came on within a few minutes,
lasted sometimes as long as an hour and a half, and
was not followed by any depression. When the
electric current was substituted for the stimulus of
volition there was no gain in energy with alcohol.
A more detailed investigation was made by Frey,
who arrived at the conclusion that the action of
alcohol differed according to the condition of the
muscle, that it had a depressing effect on unfatigued
muscle, lowering considerably the force of the indi-
vidual contractions, while it stimulated fatigued
muscle, as was shown by its prolonging the duration
of the working period. These results Frey explained
24 ALCOHOLISM.
by supposing that in unfatigued muscle alcohol acted
purely by depressing the peripheral excitability of
the nervous system, while in the case of fatigued
muscle it was used up as food, its combustion fur-
nishing the muscle with fresh energy. In Frey^s
experiments only very small quantities of alcohol
were used, 5 to 10 grms. of absolute alcohol di-
luted with water, or equivalent amounts of beer or
wine. Such a dose, it will be noted, would correspond
to very much less than half a pint of beer of the
strength of 4 per cent., or to a little more than half
a nip of rum or spirits. Frey did not find that
the stimulant effect was succeeded by any reactive
weakness.
In a later paper on the question, published in
reply to some adverse criticisms of his earlier work,
Frey to some extent abandons his first view as to
the different effect of alcohol on fatigued and un-
fatigued muscle, but adheres to his position that the
stimulant action of alcohol is not followed by any
phase of depression. He asserts further that the
favourable effect on working capacity persists for as
long as two or three hours.
One of the critics of Frey's first paper, Destree,
repeating his experiments with similar doses, found
that alcohol increased the power of muscular work
whether the muscle was fatigued or not, but that the
stimulation was very brief, and Avas succeeded by a
fall in working capacity which far outbalanced the
initial gain.
Rossi observed that 80 grms. of rum caused an
increase in energy followed by a decrease. With
PHYSIOLOGICAL ACTION OF ALCOHOL. 25
smaller doses — 25 grms. — this secondary decrease
did not always occur.
In Tavernari's experiments, made on two indi-
viduals who were first fatigued by walking exercise
before the ergographic seance, it appeared that 50
grms. of Marsala (equivalent to 10 grms. of absolute
alcohol) was followed by a distinct gain in working
capacity, shown chiefly in an increase in the number
of contractions. In one of the subjects 400 grms.
of Graz beer (equal to 18 or 20 grms. of alcohol)
had practically the same effect as the Marsala ; in
the other individual it produced hardly any influence
on the curve. Tavernari found, in contradiction with
Warren and most other observers, that the stimulant
effect of alcohol was equally distinct with electrical
excitation.
Scheffer in his experiments did not take complete
ergographic curves, but measured the amount of
work done in successive series, each consisting of a
definite number of contractions. He found that
10 c.c. of absolute alcohol diluted with water increased
the working capacity if given within fifteen minutes
of commencing work, but caused a decrease if
administered earlier. This result he referred to the
onset of a secondary paralysing action of the drug.
Scheffer further investigated the effect of alcohol on
muscle in the frog deprived of its brain, and found
that small doses caused an increase in energy as long
as the muscle nerve-endings were intact, but that
this effect disappeared when they were paralysed
with curare.
Partridge experimented on himself and on another
26 ALCOHOLISM.
subject with an improvised ergograph^ using a method
similar to that of Scheffer^ viz. measurement of the
work done in series each made up of a fixed number
of contractions. He found that in his own case
45 grms. of an alcohol of 33*3 per cent, strength
had practically no effect, and that 90 grms.
caused an increase in energy during the first half-
hour of work, followed by a decrease in the succeed-
ing half-hour. On his companion 60 grms. had a
purely depressing effect, causing a decided fall in the
output of work.
Oseretzkowsky and Kraepelin, whose study of the
question is the most careful and exhaustive that has
/yet appeared, have cleared up some of the points
left in obscurity in the earlier investigations. They
found that with doses ranging from 15 to 50 grms.
of alcohol there was a notable gain in working
capacity, which on analysis was seen to depend
almost entirely on an increase in the number of con-
tractions in the ergogram. The force of the indi-
vidual contractions, on the other hand, showed at
most a slight initial rise followed by a regular fall.
The stimulant effect thus apparent in the prolonga-
tion of the working period lasted about forty
minutes, and was then succeeded by a phase of
depression.
Fere in several series of experiments obtained
similar results — that is to say, a decided increase in
working capacity, lasting a short time and followed
by a decrease in energy which more than com-
pensated the initial gain. And he further found
that this stimulant action was distinctly greater, and
PHYSIOLOGICAL ACTION OF ALCOHOL. 27
the subsequent depression less, when the alcohol,
instead of being swallowed, was merely retained in
the mouth during the experiment. From this he
inferred that the increase in energy was due to a
reflex stimulation through the nerves of taste.
It is clear, then, from the foregoing review, that
the majority of observers are agreed that alcohol in
small doses increases the output of muscular work as
measured by the ergograph, and further that it does
this mainly by prolonging the working period.
This effect is evidently due to the influence of the
nervous system, since, according to nearly all the
experiments (except Tavernari^s),it is not perceptible
when the muscles are excited by electricity. While
the number of contractions is thus increased by
alcohol, the force of the individual contraction is
either unaffected or is at most momentarily increased.
As to the time during which the stimulant effect
of the drug is perceptible, it seems generally admitted
that, though probably varying within pretty wide
limits, it is in all cases relatively short. And it may
also be taken as clearly established by the greater
weight of evidence that the phase of stimulation is
usually followed by a period of depression which
more than counterbalances the initial gain in energy.
As to the interpretation of this stimulant effect
there is some difference of opinion. Kraepelin
apparently regards it as a result of a direct exci-
tation of the psycho-motor cells of the brain ; others,
on the contrary, attribute it to a lowering of the
activity of the higher centres which ordinarily con-
trol the motor area, and see in it, therefore, merely
28 ALCOHOLISM.
an initial stage of the essentially paralysing action
of alcohol ; while, as we pointed out above, the
experiments of Fere suggest that, though of the
nature of a true stimulation, it depends, not on the
direct action of the drug on the brain cells, but
on its reflex influence through the sensory nerves
of the mouth and stomach.
In ordinary work, of course, in addition to the
amount of muscular effort, we have to take into con-
sideration the sensory element involved in the varying
degree of accuracy of perception and movement that
the particular task may demand ; and as we have
seen that these sensory functions are generally de-
pressed by alcohol, it is obvious that such advantage
as may be derived from the motor stimulation will in
these circumstances be proportionately discounted.
Experiments to test the effect of alcohol from this
practical point of view have been made, the most re-
markable being those carried out by Aschaffenburg
on a group of four compositors working at their trade.
The working time on four successive days of the ex-
periment was divided into quarter-hour periods, and
at the close of the first of these periods on the second
and fourth days 200 grms. of a Greek wine con-
taining about 18 per cent, of alcohol were adminis-
tered. On the other days no alcohol was taken.
On contrasting the work actually done with the
amount which, allowing for the probable gain through
practice, it was calculated ought to have been done,
it was found that in all cases alcohol seemed to have
lessened the performance — that is to say that the in-
terference with the sensory element in this skilled
PHYSIOLOGICAL ACTION OF ALCOHOL. 29
work was sufficient to outweigh the stimulant action
on the motor side. There was a good deal of differ-
ence in the effect on the several men, the actual loss
in work appearing rather more evident in one indi-
vidual whose drinking was ordinarily confined to
occasional bouts of convivial excess. This latter
detail is of some interest, for it illustrates a point to
which we shall have occasion to refer later on, namely
the bearing of the individual reaction to alcohol on
the custom of industrial drinking. We shall find that
in trades where that custom is in vogue there are very
usually a certain number of workmen who, in con-
trast with their fellows, are pure convivial drinkers,
and never try to work on liquor. And on inquiry it is
generally ascertained that, like this compositor and
like the second subject in Partridge^s experiments,
these men are exceptional ii^ their reaction to alcohol,
and derive no stimulation from it, or are so unfavour-
ably affected in their sensory functions that they find
its net influence decidedly detrimental.
So far we have dealt almost entirely with the
effect of alcohol on the nervous element in muscular
work, and have only referred incidentally to its
direct relation to muscular energy. This latter
question in a great measure belongs to the larger
problem of the food value of alcohol, and can, there-
fore, hardly be regarded as admitting of any final
answer in the present state of physiological knowledge.
All that the available facts enable us to do is to
limit the number of possible solutions, and perhaps
to indicate, though rather uncertainly, their relative
degrees of probability.
30 ALCOHOLISM.
Of these facts the best ascertained is that alcohol,
when taken in moderate doses, is entirely consumed
in the body. In the latest investigation of this
point, that carried out by Atwater, it was found that
98 per cent, of the amount administered could be so
accounted for. It is only when an excessive quantity
is taken that any portion of it passes out of the
body unchanged and can be recovered from the
excretions.
From the fact that it is oxidised in the system, it
has sometimes been rather hastily inferred that
alcohol, quite apart from the question whether it is
also a poison, must certainly be a food, and more
particularly a source of muscular energy. Such a
conclusion, however, is not by any means of certain
validity. It is, on the contrary, quite conceivable
that a substance, though readily oxidisable in the
body, might lack other essential attributes of a true
food, and that its potential energy might not be
available for muscular function. And there is, in
fact, a good deal of experimental evidence which
suggests that such substances do exist, and further,
that alcohol is one of them. It has been shown, for
instance, that malic and other fruit acids, which are
absorbed as such into the circulation, and are oxidised
in the economy without being integrated in the living
tissues, though they yield heat, fail to replace the
food stuffs which are so assimilated by the organism,
and that when they are substituted for such food
stuffs they do not maintain the body weight. These
substances are what, in the language of one school
of physiology, are termed pure thermogens, as dis-
PHYSIOLOGICAL ACTION OF ALCOHOL. 31
tinguished from true foods or bio-thermogens, such
as fats, carbohydrates, and proteids, which become
incorporated in the anatomical elements and supply
their vital needs.
Now, alcohol seems to occupy a similar position to
that of the pure thermogens. Except to an inappreci-
able extent — about one tenth according to the experi-
ments of Lallemand and Perrin — it does not become
fixed in the tissues, but circulates in the blood. And
it appears also to have the characteristic of the pure
thermogens that, unlike fats and carbohydrates, it
does not protect proteid — that is to say that when
it is substituted in equivalent amount for part of the
carbohydrate in the ordinary diet, there is an increase
in the nitrogenous waste, indicating the using up of
some of the proteid of the body. On this point, however,
the evidence is not entirely accordant. On the one
hand the careful researches of Miura, which are in
essential agreement with the earlier results of Stamm-
reich, would support the view expressed above ; they
showed that when a portion of the carbohydrate in
the regular diet was replaced by an isodynamic
quantity of alcohol — a quantity, that is to say, of
equivalent combustion value — there was an increase
of nitrogenous excretion which was even greater than
that which ensued when the carbohydrate was simply
reduced to the same extent without any addition
of alcohol. This latter result Miura attributed to
the direct disintegrating influence of alcohol as a
protoplasmic poison. On the other hand, the experi-
ments of Atwater show that in some cases, though
not invariably, there is no increase in nitrogenous
32 ALCOHOLISM.
waste on a partially alcoholic diet, and since this
occurs when the subject of the experiment is doing
hard work, as well as when he is at rest, Atwater
believes that under the circumstances it is probable
that the alcohol has really served as a food, and has
furnished the energy for muscular effort. In this con-
nection, however, we have to remember that such an
absence of nitrogenous waste, when it does occur,
may be due, not to the alcohol replacing the carbo-
hydrate as food, but to the narcotic influence which
the drug exercises on some of the organic activities.
The probability of this being the true explanation is
strengthened by the fact, to which Kassowitz has
drawn attention, that a similar effect can be produced
by the administration of other narcotics, such as
opium, in quantities so minute — e. g. a milligramme
of morphia — that the value of their combustion can-
not possibly be a factor in the result.
Moreover, the presumption that alcohol is a pure
thermogen and that it does not serve as a source of
muscular energy is supported by evidence of another
sort which has been brought forward by Chauveau.
This observer proceeds from the fact, obvious to
anyone who looks at their chemical formulas, that
the combustion of alcohol (CgHgO), as compared
with that of an ordinary carbohydrate such as starch
(P\ci,{^<fi)iQ), requires more oxygen, or, in other
words, yields a lower proportion of carbonic acid
(CO3) to the oxygen absorbed. Hence when part
of the carbohydrate in the diet of a working animal
is replaced by an equivalent amount of alcohol, if
the latter body is really utilised for the supply of
PHYSIOLOGICAL ACTION OF ALCOHOL. 33
muscular energy, it is to be anticipated that there
will be a corresponding modification in the respira-
tory exchanges, and that the ratio of expired car-
bonic acid to inspired oxygen will be less than
before. Chauveau experimented in this way with
a dog, substituting alcohol for one third of its usual
carbohydrate diet, and found that there was no such
change in the respiratory quotient during the animal's
working hours; he inferred accordingly that the
alcohol did not furnish any portion of the muscular
energy expended.
And certain researches with the ergograph in man
point in the same direction. Schumberg, for in-
stance, has investigated the effect of alcohol on
muscular effort when the subject by hard work at
the lathe had previously used up much of the nutri-
tive material in his blood. He found that under
these circumstances alcohol failed to produce any
increase in energy, while in the same individual
when unfatigued it caused, as in the experiments
of other observers, a notable rise in the output of
work. From this he concluded that its action was
merely that of a nervous excitant, that it facili-
tated the discharge of the muscular energy derived
from the food stuffs proper, but that it was itself
incapable of furnishing such energy by its oxidation.
On the whole, then, we may say that, so far as
any opinion can be expressed on a matter of such
obscurity, the weight of evidence seems to favour
the theory that alcohol does not serve as a, source of
muscular energy, and that its use as a stimulant for
work depends altogether on its excitant action on
o
34 ALCOHOLISM.
the psycho-motor centres, and has no relation to its
food value. If this theory be correct it may help to
explain the tendency, to which we shall refer later
on, to select beer rather than spirits as the chief
form of liquor in industrial drinking ; the consider-
able quantity of carbohydrates (averaging about
4 per cent, in ordinary ale) in the former beverage
would on this assumption give it a manifest advan-
tage in a diet for muscular work.
If, on the other hand, the alternative view be the
true one, and if alcohol is in the full sense a food
stuff, and, therefore, capable of replacing other food
stuffs to some extent in a labouring diet, it is evi-
dent that its attractions would be considerably
enhanced thereby, particularly for those classes of
workers whose habitual fare is largely constituted of
bulky and indigestible carbohydrates. For if it is
such a food its energy value should be exceptionally
high, being, for instance, much above that of starch
or sugar. Thus the combustion of one gramme of
absolute alcohol will furnish 6980 calories, the
calorie or centigrade heat-unit being, it will be re-
called, the amount of energy required to raise the
temperature of one gramme of water one degree. A
gramme of water-free bread, on the other hand, will
yield only 4351 calories and a gramme of water-
free potato 4234 calories. Assuming, therefore,
for alcohol an energy value corresponding to its heat
equivalent, and expressing the relation in English
measures and English units of force, we should con-
clude that the labourer whose daily allowance of
" four ale " contains about 5 oz. of absolute alcohol
PHYSIOLOGICAL ACTION OF ALCOHOL. 35
will derive from the alcohol alone, and without taking
account of the carbohydrates with it, an energy of
1355 foot tons, or about as much as he would get from
J lb. of water- free bread ; so that his beer will
allow him to reduce his intake of ordinary bread
by nearly 1 lb., giving him in lieu a beverage
agreeable to the taste, acting as a condiment, and
with its nutritive matter in a readily assimilable
form. Or, to state the matter in another way, if we
take du Chaumont's estimate, which puts the amount
of potential energy in the diet for an ordinary day's
work at 4300 foot tons, then we see that the beer
ration we have cited can furnish nearly one third of
this total sum of energy. As a modification of his
normally coarse and ill- cooked diet this substitution
of alcohol is likely to recommend itself to the labourer
as an unmixed advantage.
To conclude this chapter, we may briefly sum up
the main results of our discussion of the relation of
alcohol to muscular work. We have seen that in
moderate doses its excitant action on the nervous
system facilitates the discharge of energy, so that
the working period is prolonged and the output of
work is thereby increased ; further, that, owing to
the transitory duration of this effect and to its usual
replacement by a state of lowered activity, frequent
renewal of the excitant influence becomes necessary
if work is to be continued. We have also noted that,
at the same time that it stimulates motor function,
alcohol has a sedative action on sensory function, one
result of which is that it dulls the disagreeable sensa-
tions to which the excessive amount or the unpleasant
36 ALCOHOLISM.
conditions of labour may give rise : it acts, in short,
a3 an industrial anaesthetic in paradoxical associa-
tion with its action as an industrial stimulant. And,
finally, we have seen that it is possible, though on the
whole unlikely, that in addition to possessing this
influence on the nervous system — which in any case
is its most important quality from this point of view
— alcohol may also have the properties of a true
food, and may by its decomposition in the body
contribute to the supply of muscular energy.
CHAPTER III.
DRUNKENNESS.
If, instead of the small doses whose action was
discussed in the last chapter, large quantities of
alcohol are taken at once or within a short period
of time, a state of acute intoxication ensues which
is familiar under the name of "drunkenness.^'
This intoxication presents itself under appearances
which differ widely according to the nervous organi-
sation of the drinker; and as these differences affect
more particularly the point of most concern to us
here, namely the relation of drunkenness to conduct,
it will be convenient to describe separately two forms
of this condition, viz. what we may call normal
drunkenness, or drunkenness as it occurs in the
average healthy subject, and pathological drunken-
ness, or the drunkenness of the nervously unstable,
who exhibit a special cerebral susceptibility to the
action of alcohol.
In normal drunkenness the symptoms are those
of a regularly progressive paralysis of the higher
brain centres. At first this is shown merely in a
lessened power of control, which gives rise to a
,, '^f' THE
UNIVERSITY
OF
^MFOHH\h,
38 ALCOHOLISM.
semblance of increased mental activity, so that speech
and gesture are freer, the current of ideas seems
more rapid, the emotional tone is raised. Yery soon,
however, this condition is exaggerated into one of
more obvious disorder, speech becomes incoherent,
the gait is staggering, ideation becomes wild and
disconnected, and the emotional instability is ex-
pressed in fatuous gaiety, in sentimental drivel, or
in motiveless whimpering. In this condition there
is an extreme proneness to impulsive conduct, which,
as we shall see when we return to the point presently,
may sometimes be of a seriously criminal sort.
The phase of apparent excitement and increased
motor activity is of short duration : it disappears as
the paralytic symptoms grow more pronounced, and
the individual becomes " dead drunk," and falls into
the profound sleep which is the normal termination
of a debauch. In rare instances, where the quantity
of alcohol taken has been very large, the poisoning
affects the vital centres in the medulla, and the
drinker dies of cardiac or respiratory paralysis.
To some extent the character of the intoxication
may be modified by the form of the liquor, and more
particularly by the amount and nature of the impuri-
ties which it contains. In experiments on animals,
for instance, the condition of " dead drunkenness "
is much more rapidly induced by impure spirit with
a high proportion of amylic alcohol ; and such spirit
is also more liable to cause fatal poisoning. It has,
in fact, been shown by Dujardin-Beaumetz and Audige
that the toxicity of the alcohols is in direct ratio to
their atomicity ; and since it is in the trade spirit
DRUNKENNESS. 39
prepared from potatoes that the higher alcohols are
found in largest quantity, this spirit when imperfectly
rectified is correspondingly poisonous. And doubt-
less the same thing holds true of the effects of new
raw spirit in man. Nor are these injurious qualities
altogether absent even in fairly well rectified spirit :
the experiments of Brunton and Tunnicliffe have
shown that grain whiskey after rectification contains
traces of such bodies as furfurol or furfuraldehyde
in sufficient amount to give rise to appreciably dele-
terious effects.
It is further freely asserted that impure spirit is
apt to produce a peculiarly dangerous and impulsive
form of intoxication ; and criminal acts are often set
down to the credit of specially bad whiskey on which
the criminal is supposed to have got drunk. The
evidence in support of this view is not, however, very
strong : in most of the instances which it is sought
to interpret in this way it appears much more
probable that the abnormal character of the drunken-
ness was due, as we know to be generally the case,
to a permanent or temporary instability of brain in
the drinker, rendering him more susceptible to the
cerebral action of alcohol. So far, at all events, as
our present knowledge extends, we may venture to
affirm that this latter explanation seems to cover
practically all the facts, and that, under the actual
conditions prevalent in this country, there is no like-
lihood that the impurities in the ordinary alcoholic
beverages are ever of such a nature, or present in
such quantity, as to produce furious drunkenness in
a normally constituted drinker.
40 ALCOHOLISM.
From the short account we have given of its sym-
ptoms, it will be seen that simple drunkenness is
characterised by the affection in regular and fairly
rapid sequence of all the levels — cerebral, bulbar,
and spinal — of the nervous centres. This fact is of
dominant importance in connection with that aspect
of the matter which particularly engages our interest,
and to the consideration of which we have now to
turn, namely the criminal aptitudes related to ordi-
nary drunkenness.
Most usually the tendency of impulsive action in
this condition is towards the trivial or the ludicrous ;
but it may at times take on a different character,
and may lead to gravely criminal conduct. The
primary direction of such criminal impulsiveness is
generally to acts of acquisitiveness or lust ; it hap-
pens but rarely that the healthy drunkard is
spontaneously suicidal or destructive, though he may,
no doubt, occasionally become so as a result of some
intercurrent stimulus acting on his unstable and
over-irritable mood. Under any circumstances, how-
ever, in this form of drunkenness the rapidly
increasing in co-ordination restricts so narrowly the
possibilities of conduct that there is relatively little
chance of the performance of criminal acts of any
complexity. The only exception to this rule is in
the case of the sexual appetite, which is stimulated
in the early stages of intoxication, so that very
slight impairment of control may give an outlet to
the heightened impulses of lust, and may so lead to
rape or assaults on women. With this reservation,
we may say that the influence of simple drunkenness
DRUNKENNESS. 41
on conduct, at least in so far as the primary impulses
are concerned, is of comparatively slight practical
importance, because these impulses are for the most
part socially harmless, and because the confused and
disabled state of the drinker forbids their taking
shape in acts of a very complex character.
And even the irritability of mood which renders
the half-drunken individual liable to exaggerated
reactions of anger, and which is thus the cause of a
good deal of the less serious violence connected with
drunkenness, is of very short duration in the healthy
carouser, who will usually sleep off the effects of
his liquor in a few hours. The wise recognition of
this fact, it may be recalled, was the reason for the
old legal method of punishing drunkenness by putting
the offender in the stocks for the space of six hours,
"by which time,'' says Blackstone, "the statute
presumes that he will have recovered his senses,
and will not be liable to do mischief to his neigh-
bours.''
So much for conduct in ordinary drunkenness. An
entirely different condition of things is met with when
we come to consider the symptoms of intoxication in
individuals whose nervous system, whether by reason
of congenital defect or acquired disorder, is abnor-
mally constituted. In such individuals — and probably
in such individuals alone — there is a special suscep-
tibility to the action of alcohol, which causes a
marked predominance of those symptoms that are
due to interference with the higher mental functions,
while the affection of the lower brain centres and of
the spinal cord is relatively inappreciable. This
42 ALCOHOLISM.
abnormal reaction is shown sometimes by the occur-
rence after moderate doses of liquor of a condition
of wild maniacal excitement, sometimes by the de-
velopment of a state of prolonged dream-conscious-
ness in which the individual may automatically go
through very complex and elaborate series of acts.
This latter condition, which has been very carefully
studied by Dr. Crothers, is obviously much more
favourable to the realisation of morbid impulses than
is the more diffused disorder of simple drunkenness ;
and we find accordingly that it is in this phase of
pathological intoxication that the graver crimes due
to alcohol are usually committed. And this is the
more readily to be explained because many of the
conditions that create the special cerebral suscepti-
bility to alcohol are themselves of a nature to give a
morbid set to the mood, which finds expression in
destructive or suicidal impulses.
This double influence — on the aptitude to automatic
action and on its direction — is very clearly seen in
the case of the most important of the predispositions
to morbid drunkenness, namely chronic alcoholism.
As that diseased condition will be fully discussed in
the next chapter, it will be more convenient to reserve
till then what we have further to say concerning the
alcoholic dream-state. For the moment, therefore,
we shall be content with a passing reference to the
other disorders of brain which have a like tendency
to create this morbid propensity. In the order of
their numerical importance they may be ranked
somewhat as follows : congenital defect, usually con-
nected with an insane or alcoholic parentage; epilepsy;
DRUNKENNESS. 43
injuries to the head; antecedent insanity; and, in a
lesser degree, syphilis and certain other infectious
diseases.
In a given case, as will be readily understood,
several of these causes may come into play, and it
very often happens that one or more of them will be
found in association with some degree of chronic
alcoholism, and will then appear merely to bring about
an earlier development of the automatic tendency
than is usual in uncomplicated cases of progressive
intoxication. Under these conditions the direction
of the impulses in the dream- state is apt to be very
similar to that in purely alcoholic cases. And even
in instances where the influence of chronic intoxication
is least marked, and where the disposition to auto-
matism seems to depend almost altogether on some
other cause of instability of brain there is very
frequently, as we have said, a similar tendency to
those impulses that go with a depressed emotional
tone — impulses, that is to say, of violence to self or
others.
The main result, therefore, that we have to retain
from the foregoing discussion is the important
difference that exists between normal and pathological
drunkenness in relation to disorders of conduct.
Morbid drunkenness, we have seen, may, and fre-
quently does, give rise to impulses which are gravely
anti-social in tendency, and which, from the special
character of the intoxication, are very likely to issue
in completed and intricate actions. In simple
drunkenness, on the other hand, the conditions, as
regards both the usual direction of the impulses and
44 ALCOHOLISM.
the opportunity that the intoxication allows for their
realisation, are just the reverse. And for this reason,
accordingly, simple drunkenness, except in connection
with the sexual instinct, is rarely a cause of serious
crime.
CHAPTER IV.
CHRONIC ALCOHOLISM.
The disturbance of function connoted by the word
'^drunkenness/ Vhich we discussed in the last chapter,
though considerable in degree, is ordinarily of brief
duration, and does not long outlast the presence of
the intoxicating agent in the blood and tissues. It
is thus essentially different from the chronic poisoning
that we have now to deal with.
In this latter condition, which has, of course, no
necessary connection with drunkenness, but on the
contrary may, and very often does, develop in
persons who have never been drunk in the popular
sense of the word, the matter of predominant im-
portance is not the immediate effect that alcohol
produces on the nervous functions, but the series of
degenerative changes in the various tissues of the
body that are set up by its persistent action.
These changes, to which in their totality the term
"chronic alcoholism" has been applied, differ, of
course, in their degree of gravity according to the
intensity and duration of the alcoholic influence, and
may thus vary from relatively slight modifications of
the nutrition of the cell up to the total destruction
46 ALCOHOLISM.
of the essential tissue elements, and from a moderate
disorder of bodily and mental health to fatal disease
or dementia.
The quantity of the intoxicant which is necessary
as a regular dose in order to bring about these in-
jurious effects has been diversely estimated, and does,
no doubt, in reality vary within a fairly wide range
in different individuals, and in the same individual
under different circumstances. It has been generally
assumed — and the assumption is confirmed by ex-
perience — that the limit of safety has been passed
when a larger quantity is taken in twenty-four hours
than can be completely oxidised in the body so that
traces are found in the urine. The experiments of
Anstie put this daily amount at an ounce and a half
of absolute alcohol, and Parkes and Wollowicz esti-
mated it at something between one and two ounces.
Expressed in terms of the alcoholic liquors in common
use in this country, this would be from one to two
pints of " four ale,^^ or from a little less than half a
quartern to a quartern of rum or whiskey. These
experiments were made on healthy men living under
good hygienic conditions and on a liberal diet ; it is
likely, therefore, that the daily allowance they suggest
is to be taken as a maximum, which would be ex-
cessive for persons of less robust physique or placed
in less favourable circumstances. This view would
be consistent with ordinary experience, which goes
to show that the tolerance of alcohol may be con-
siderably modified by the drinker's mode of life and
diet : the sedentary worker, breathing an impure air
and living on bad or insufficient food, suffers from
CHRONIC ALCOHOLISM. 47
the effects of intemperate drinking sooner, and more
severely, than a well-fed labourer working in the
open air. And experiments on animals lead to the
same conclusion. Dogs, on an alcoholic diet, have
been found to develop the lesions of chronic intoxi-
cation much earlier and to succumb sooner when
they fail to take a full allowance of ordinary nourish-
ment. To some extent this result is no doubt due to
the more intense local effect which alcoholic liquors
are likely to produce when the digestive tract is not
protected from their action by the presence of food.
The rapid development of gastric catarrh as a con-
sequence of taking spirits on an empty stomach is a
notorious instance of this sort. In its turn, of course,
the digestive disorder so set up tends to further im-
pairment of nutrition, and also, through the unpleasant
sensations which accompany it and which alcohol can
relieve, it excites the drinker to renewed excess.
In these ways, therefore, it is evident that the
immediate action of alcohol on the digestive organs
is a factor of considerable account. And recent
researches on the pathology of alcoholism tend to
give it still greater importance ; for they show some
reason to suspect that the generalised disorders of
the chronic intoxication are not due wholly, nor even
perhaps mainly, to the influence of the alcohol circu-
lating in the blood, but that they may depend in
still larger measure on secondary infections from the
digestive system, which are enabled to penetrate into
the economy through the open door of the lesions
produced by the direct action of the drug on the
gastro-intestinal mucous membrane.
48 ALCOHOLISM.
The discussion of this problem of pathology, how-
ever, does not, of course, come within the limits of our
present task ; we are merely concerned to touch on it as
an evidence of the peculiar importance which attaches
to the dietary conditions of the drinker as a factor
in determining his susceptibility to the effects of
alcohol.
Neither need we dwell in any detail on the nature
of the morbid changes of chronic alcoholism, what-
ever be their exact mode of origin ; it is quite
sufficient for our purposes to recall — and that very
shortly — what are their main characteristics. Of
these the most important is that they are generalised
in their distribution, though of course varying pretty
widely in their degree of incidence on different
organs according to the peculiarities of reaction in
each individual drinker. In one case the liver will
be predominantly affected, in another the brain or
the peripheral nerves, in another the generative
glands ; but in each instance the rest of the economy
will also show unequivocal signs of damage.
As may be readily understood from its extreme
complexity of organisation, the nervous tissue is that
which suffers most frequently and severely; and
there is, in fact, some reason to think that the dis-
orders in other tissues may be to some extent
secondary to the impairment of the nerve structures
governing their nutrition.
However that may be, the point of practical im-
portance to us here is that this special susceptibility
of the nervous elements combined with the generalised
distribution of the visceral disorders gives its dis-
CHRONIC ALCOHOLISM. 49
tinctive character to the clinical picture of chronic
alcoholism ; owing to this double relationship the
chronic intoxication is a condition of mens insana in
corpore insano ; or rather, to consider the aspect of
the matter which specially concerns us, namely, the
influence of the diseased state on conduct and
thought, it is a condition of corpus insanum in mente
insana, visceral disorder reflected in a weakened
brain, and so forming a morbid personality prone to
the impulses that go with deranged function, and to
the poisoned thoughts that connect themselves with
these impulses. In this fundamental conception we
have the key to the varied manifestations under
which chronic alcoholism appears in actual ex-
perience.
We may take as a type for our description the
originally healthy workman who is engaged at 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
50 ALCOHOLISM.
tongue and muscles of the face will be evident early
in the day.
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 ; night-
mares and insomnia divide the hours of rest, and
foreshadow the characters that will appear later in
the full development of delirium tremens.
Simultaneously with these signs of disease the
mood and tendencies of the drinker become notably
altered ; he grows increasingly morose, irritable, and
suspicious, showing the change of temper at first
only in his relatively abstinent moments, but later on
pretty constantly whether he be drunk or fasting.
The impulses that are connected with this morbid
mood, impulses of antagonism to the self and the
environment, are now apt to issue in acts which are
the more likely to come to fulfilment because by this time
the drinker has begun to develop that special suscepti-
bility to the cerebral effects of alcohol to which we
referred in the last chapter. Moderate doses of
liquor, which earlier in his career would have had but
little effect on his nervous system, now induce in the
drunkard a condition of disordered consciousness, a
dream-state or phase of somnambulism which may
last a considerable time — in some instances as long
as twenty-four hours — and in which he will be able
to go through connected series of purposive acts, but
will retain no memory, or only a fragmentary memory,
of their nature and motive. In this way the drinker
CHRONIC ALCOHOLISM. 51
suffering from the visceral disorders of the chronic
intoxication, and in the vaguely depressed mood
which is their consequence, takes a few extra glasses
of liquor, and then " loses himself/' and makes an
automatic attempt to commit suicide, usually in some
very elementary method, as by jumping into a river
or swallowing whatever poisonous mixture he may
find to his hand. Or again, in this same state he
will obey a homicidal impulse of like origin, and will
murder his wife and family.
Of the details and of the motives of his actions he
will usually have no memory, or at most the vague
and imperfect recollection that we are familiar with
in the case of dreams. As a general rule the total
loss of recollection is commoner in the earlier period
of the drinker's career, while it not infrequently
happens that when older in alcoholism he will do
quite similar acts in a less profound state of dream-
consciousness, so that he can remember a good deal
about them, and will probably recognise, and to some
extent still feel, the motives by which they were
prompted. These latter cases mark the transition
to a more advanced stage of mental disorder, .in
which the diseased impulses have grown stronger,
and the power of restraint has weakened. In these
circumstances we find that the morbid tendencies,
which in the earlier period lay hidden and dormant
till the occurrence of an acute intoxication revealed
them, have now become so rooted in the personality
that their influence is persistently evident in conduct
and thought.
In its full development this is the condition of
52 ALCOHOLISM.
chronic alcoholic insanity, in which the drinker^s
acts are related to fixed delusions, very commonly
to the effect that he is being poisoned or mutilated
or that his wife is unfaithful. Li accordance with
these ideas he will now be likely to do with full
deliberation the same sort of morbid acts to which
he showed a proclivity in the phases of more or
less profound automatism earlier in his intoxication ;
that is to say, he will be suicidal or homicidal, and,
in the latter case, the usual direction of his im-
pulses will be against those who are sexually or
socially in closest relation to him.
The mental enfeeblement, which appears early in
the course of chronic alcoholism, and which is very
evident under all this delusional activity, becomes
still more pronounced in some cases, and is the
dominant characteristic in the last stage of alcoholic
decadence, when the drinker lapses into helpless
dementia.
The foregoing description, it will, of course, be
understood, is purely schematic, and the type that
jit represents is in countless details modified and
1 deformed in the facts as they are actually met with.
Thus, cases occur in which the whole course of
intoxication is summed up in a gradual weakening
of mind without any obtrusive perversions of con-
duct. Or, again, the early and severe implication
of other organs may carry off the drinker without
giving time for any marked affection of the brain.
In other instances the evolution seems to become
arrested, so that, despite continued excesses, the
stage, e.g. J of delusional insanity or the stage of
CHRONIC ALCOHOLISM. 53
extreme dementia is never reached. And, of course,
there are fairly frequent examples also of a peculiar
power of resistance to alcohol, which enables the
drinker to live to an advanced age without showing
evidence of damage to his brain or to any other
part of his economy.
Moreover, even in the more typical instances,
the process of alcoholisation which we have outlined
is not a regular one ; the alcoholic habit is naturally
liable to interruption and to increase, and even in-
dependently of the variations that are so induced,
there are frequent episodes that break the even
sequence of events. Of these the most important is
the occurrence of outbreaks of acute insanity, to which
in their intenser and briefer form the name of deli-
rium tremens has been given. This diseased state,
which is essentially a condition of hallucinatory con-
fusion, represents a temporary aggravation of the
disorders in thought and impulse that grow out of the
morbid changes of chronic alcoholism, and is, there-
fore, very apt to be accompanied by criminal ten-
dencies of the kind to which we have already referred.
In this way the impulses that it reveals in more or
less definite form are often, as it were, an anticipation
of the acts and thought of the chronic insanity that
will develop later, and they will similarly very fre-
quently suggest the direction that impulsive action
will take in subsequent phases of dream-consciousness.
This latter point is of further interest for the reason
that in many instances an attack of delirium tremens
occurs on the threshold of the period of special cerebral
susceptibility, the brain shock that it involves helping
^^
54 ALCOHOLISM.
apparently to determine the aptitude to pathological
drunkenness. These delirious attacks vary, of course,
very much in intensity and in duration ; sometimes
they amount to nothing more than a slight increase
of the shakiness and faint hallucinatory tendency that
ordinarily follow a heavy debauch ; sometimes they
are attended with severe fever and prostration, and
may end in death. In other cases, again, often with
less intensity in the tremor and in the vividness of the
hallucinations, the delusional state is slower to dis-
appear, and the mental condition clears up less com-
pletely ; cases of this sort form the connecting link
between delirium tremens and chronic insanity.
In the course of the foregoing remarks we have
more than once touched on the salient points regard-
ing conduct in chronic alcoholism ; but it will
nevertheless be desirable, before closing the present
chapter, to focus our attention for a moment on this
specific aspect of the matter.
We have seen that of the graver morbid ten-
dencies met with in chronic intoxication the most
constant is the tendency to suicide. It is liable to
manifest itself during delirium tremens, and in the
advanced stages of chronic insanity, but is perhaps
most frequent in the dream-state of pathological
drunkenness. In this condition, of course, the choice
of the means of destruction and the method of its
application will be very likely to show the irration-
ality and in co-ordination of the dream-consciousness;
and for this reason a good proportion — probably,
indeed, a large majority — of the suicidal attempts in
the automatic phase fail of success. And we may
AJ
CHRONIC ALCOHOLISM. 55
remark in this connection that conversely the majority
of such abortive attempts, at least in this country,
are due to alcoholism. This we might, indeed,
expect on a priori grounds, for there is no other
condition of wide prevalence that shares with alco-
holism the characteristic of giving rise to suicidal
impulses under conditions which are so frequently
unfavourable to their fulfilment. And so far as the
matter has been made the subject of direct inquiry
this anticipation has been borne out; thus in 220
consecutive observations of such attempts the pro-
portion due to alcoholism was found to be 78 per
cent., the usual condition, present in four fifths of
the cases, being drunkenness supervening on chronic
intoxication.
Closely akin to the suicidal impulse, and often
?^ accompanying it, is the homicidal impulse, which,
similarly, may be realised in a deliberate act har-
monising with persecutory delusions in the chronic
insanity of alcoholism, or may show itself in the
dream-state of morbid drunkenness, and in that case
will very often be abortive.
Another variety of crime which often occurs in
chronic alcoholism depends on morbid impulses of
lust, leading, as in the allied state of senile decay, to
the violation of children. These offences are some-
times committed in the dream-state, but are more
often related to the later phases of alcoholic de-
mentia.
Other criminal acts inspired by malice, such as
arson, or the destruction of property in other ways,
are occasionally committed by the chronic drunkard;
56 ALCOHOLISM.
and he may also be guilty of offences of acquisitive-
ness that are directly due to his intoxication.
These offences, however, are less characteristic of
this disorder than are the graver impulses to suicide,
to violence, and to lust.
Finally, in addition to such more serious crimes,
chronic alcoholism leads, of course, also to offences
of a more trivial sort, depending on the incapacity of
the drunkard to live by other than parasitic means ;
in this way it recruits, though not probably in any
very large degree, the ranks of vagrancy, begging,
and prostitution.
CHAPTER V.
SOCIAL CAUSES OF INTEMPERANCE.
From the study of alcohol and alcoholism in their
relations to the individual drinker, with which we
have been occupied in the preceding chapters, we
now pass to the consideration of intemperance as a
problem of sociology.
In approaching the subject from this new point of
view the first task which meets us, and which we
propose to take up in the present chapter, is the
investigation of the social and industrial conditions
that promote alcoholic excessi It is at the present
time particularly needful to insist on the importance
of this aspect of the drink question; for of recent
years it has been rather the fashion to ignore the
predominant influence of social causes in the genesis
of intemperance, and, with a bias very unusual in
the study of such problems, to concentrate attention
on its biological factors, or to speak more correctly,
on an imperfect and distorted conception of these
factors.
This tendency has arisen mainly from the dispro-
portionate importance attached to those instances
in which an inebriate habit is clearly connected with
58 ALCOHOLISM.
an abnormal mental organisation, and appears, there-
fore, to be relatively independent of the immediate
influence of the environment. Cases of this sort,
which are better material for psychological analysis
and seem to offer more scope for medical treat-
ment, are apt to come with greater frequency under
the notice of the physician, or at all events are more
likely to awaken his interest, than is the ordinary
sot who lacks the attraction of the neurotic temper.
As a natural result, therefore, this category of in-
ebriates has been more carefully studied, and, we
may add, has thereby gained the advantage of being
treated on more rational methods, the practical success
of which is the best guarantee of their soundness.
At the same time, however, this too exclusive atten-
tion paid to a class of drunkards who are after all
few in number and exceptional in character, has
occasionally exercised a very injurious influence on
the consideration of more important aspects of the
problem. It has led some less responsible students
of the question to assume that* the view conveniently
expressed in the formula that inebriety is a symptom
of disease offers a valid and complete explanation of
all the facts of alcoholism. Thus it has been asserted
that intemperance is always a manifestation of a
definite brain condition which creates a specific
craving for alcohol. And some enthusiasts have
even gone farther, and, assimilating this hypothetical
drink-crave to a peculiarity of anatomical structure,
have regarded the potentiality of being a drunkard
as a simple inborn trait, which, we are gravely
assured, being clearly unfavourable to its possessor,
SOCIAL CAUSES OF INTEMPERANCE. 59
must secure his early elimination in the struggle for
existence, and so lead through natural selection to
the evolution of a race immune from drink !
Extravagances of this sort, apart from such direct
error as they may engender, are likely to have a
mischievous influence, in that they divert attention
from the real biological aspects of the question, and
make an unnatural divorce between the organic and
the social causes of alcoholism, which, as we have
already pointed out, can only be understood when
they are studied in their mutual relations.
For the proper apprehension of the question we
must, therefore, at the outset get rid of this figment
of an inebriate diathesis and replace it by the rational
view that the explanation of inebriety is to be sought,
not in any specific tendencies of an abnormal brain,
but in the reaction of the normal organisation to the
ordinary physiological effects of alcohol.
It is a capital advantage of this way of approaching
the matter, that it at once brings us to the biological
interpretation of the 'action of those social and
industrial influences which — though the fantastic
theoricians of the drink-crave seem to forget the
fact — are very certainly the dominant element in the
causation of inebriety. For such conditions, of
course, are in the long run effective causes of
alcoholism, simply because and in the degree in which
they induce in the organism certain states which are
favourably modified by alcohol. It is from this
point of view, then, that we propose now to consider
them.
In Chapter II we saw that alcohol in small doses
60 ALCOHOLISM.
had the effect, through its influence on the psycho-
motor centres, of increasing the capacity for muscular
work ; and we noted further that, probably in great
part as a consequence of this motor stimulation com-
bined with a similar stimulation of functional activity
in the viscera, it had a characteristic reaction on the
emotional tone, giving rise to a sense of well-being
familiar in an exaggerated form in the expansive
mood of drunkenness.
Now, in connection with the social origin of excess,
these two actions of alcohol, though thus essentially
identical at bottom, have an entirely different signi-
ficance ; they are related to different modes of
drinking, differing in causation and differing enor-
mously in the social gravity of their results.
In the first mode of drinking, where alcohol is
taken for the sake of its effect on working capacity,
it is necessary, as we have seen, that the dose should
be moderate, so that the stimulant action may be
obtained and may not be neutralised by the disturbing
influence of the drug on other functions ; and it is
further necessary that the dose should be repeated
within a short time, so as to keep up the excitant
effect and prevent the onset of muscular depression.
The alcoholic action, therefore, that is involved in
this, which we may call industrial drinking, is con-
stant, and for that reason is peculiarly apt to bring
about the tissue changes of chronic alcoholism. And
its effect in this direction is, of course, assisted by
its tendency to be in substitution of ordinary food,
the development of chronic intoxication being, as we
have seen, considerably hastened by defective nutri-.
SOCIAL CAUSES OF INTEMPERANCE. 61
tion. But, on the otlier hand, this action is not
intense, it does not reach aciite intoxication. Hence
pure industrial drinking is a cause of chronic alco-
holism, but is not primarily a cause of drunkenness.
It is, as a rule, entirely different when alcohol is
drunk as an emotional exhilarant, and without regard
to its effect on work. Under these conditions, as in
ordinary convivial drinking, the immediate end is
not interfered with, but is rather promoted by the
taking of large doses, so that in individuals of low
culture this sort of drinking is very likely to lead to If/ A
drunkenness. But, on the other hand, as the occa- . "^ ,
sions that call for it are ordinarily infrequent, such ^-<^^^.
convivial drinking is generally not continuous.
Hence, in contrast with the constant but moderate
action of industrial drinking, we have to do in con-
vivial drinking with an action that is intense but
intermittent ; and accordingly we find that convivial
drinking is a frequent cause of drunkenness, but is
not a cause of chronic alcoholism.
These contrasted types of drinking, then, correspond
to two different attitudes of the drinker with regard
to alcohol ; and it will be observed that the terms
which we have used to denote them are, strictly
speaking, only applicable to particular varieties of
either attitude. Thus industrial drinking, or drinking
as an aid to work, is clearly allied to the drinking
that goes with disease,, with emotional depression
and worry, with bad and insufficient food, and so
forth ; in all such conditions alcohol is taken in
order to combat a state of inefficiency in the drinker,
g. state of relative ill-being. Convivial drinking, on
62 ALCOHOLISM.
the other hand, is one variety of the drinking that
belongs to states of relative well-being, when the
vital energies are above par, and when the organism
seeks the pleasant sensation given by alcohol for this
positive value.
If we desire to look at the matter in this wider
sense, we might distinguish the two types of drinking
as misery drinking and luxury drinking, or if greater
clearness be attained by the use of special terms,
we might designate them as dysphatic and eupathic
drinking. For our present purposes, however, which
have to do with the social aspect of the question, we
shall run no risk of serious error if we take the
narrower view, and deal solely with the convivial
and industrial forms of drinking which, in fact, are
those of real practical importance.
Of course, in the actual condition of things, these
two types of drinking are apt very often to occur
in combination; this is more particularly so when
industrial drinking is the primary factor ; the worker
who does his labour with the help of alcohol is sure
to have recourse to the drug for his ideals of pleasure ;
and so it is a rule for the industrial drinker to be
also addicted, when he gets the chance, to convivial
excess. On the other hand, it frequently occurs that
conditions which prevent industrial drinking may be
favourable to convivial excess. Hence we find that
while the pure industrial drinker who never carouses
convivially is relatively rare, the pure convivial
drinker Avho never works on alcohol is very common.
We have to bear this diiference in mind when we
consider the statistics of drunkenness and alcoholism ;
SOCIAL CAUSES OF INTEMPERANCE. 63
it requires us to distinguish two sorts of drunken-
ness — the drunkenness that occurs without chronic
alcoholism and indicates primary convivial excess,
and the drunkenness that occurs with chronic
alcoholism and indicates the convivial excess which
is a secondary result of industrial drinking.
As a proof and an illustration of this position we
may point to the contrast which drunkenness and
alcoholism present in their regional distribution in
this country. Before entering into the details of this
comparison, however, it will be well to say something
of the value and limitation of our statistical material.
That material has two main sources : the figures
regarding drunkenness and the various forms of crime
which are known to be specially connected with
alcoholism are furnished in the criminal statistics
from reports supplied by the police ; the informa-
tion as to the death rate for alcoholic diseases is given
in the reports of the Registrar-Greneral.
This difference of source is, unfortunately, a cause
of some difficulty in the comparison of the two classes
of data. In the first place, the registration county
to which the mortality returns refer is not identical
with the area of the same name which is used in the
criminal statistics. The difference between the bases
is not, however — except in the case of the metropolis
and the adjacent counties — so great as to detract
very seriously from the value of a rough comparison
of the two phenomena. A more troublesome matter
is that the mortality returns give no figures for
alcoholism for lesser areas than the registration
county^ so that it is impossible to use them to
64 ALCOHOLISM.
form composite districts representative of special
industrial conditions^ as can be done in examining
drunkenness.
There are two ways in which we can to some
extent meet this difficulty : we can find a second
measure of alcoholism in the incidence of notoriously
alcoholic offences — such, for instance_, as attempts to
commit suicide — the statistics of which, referring as
they do to the same police areas, can be more strictly
compared with the statistics of drunkenness ; or, on
the other hand, we may have recourse to the Regis-
trar-GeneraPs returns of the death-rate from alcoholic
diseases in the several occupational groups. This
second method works well when the regional group
has a close equivalent in a single occupational group,
as is the case with the mining and agricultural indus-
tries ; it is less satisfactory in dealing with the more
complex industrial classes. In these several ways,
then, we can establish a very fair comparison between
the incidence of drunkenness and that of alcoholism.
There remains, of course, the objection which is
very often urged against such statistics that they are
so open to fallacy as to be entirely unreliable ; the
number of arrests for drunkenness, it is said, is
determined less by the actual prevalence of the vice
than by the zeal of the police force or the amount
of available prison accommodation ; while, with the
defective system of death registration at present in
force, no real value can be attached to estimates of
the alcoholic death rate. There is undeniably enough
truth in this criticism to require that such statistics
should be taken with considerable reservation ; and
SOCIAL CAUSES OF INTEMPERANCE. 65
no one, of course, would pretend that they should
be regarded as measures of the absolute amount of
drunkenness or of alcoholism, or that it could be
legitimate to draw conclusions from slight variations,
regional or periodic, in the figures of either phe-
nomenon. But it is quite possible to take account
of such qualifying considerations without denying to
these figures a certain value for comparative pur-
poses, so that in the comparison, in sufficiently large
areas and over sufficiently long periods of drunken-
ness with alcoholism, agreement, if very close, or
difference, if very wide, may become a legitimate
ground of inference. And these conditions, as we
shall see, are fully satisfied in the present instance.
The first group of figures with which we shall deal
(Table I) concerns the frequency of arrests for
drunkenness, deaths from alcoholism and cirrhosis of
the liver — the most usual alias of alcoholism — and
attempts to commit suicide, in the several counties
of England and in North and South Wales ; the
figures represent the annual average per 100,000 of
the estimated population in the decennial period
1891—1900, and the counties are arranged in the
order of their addiction to drunkenness.
On looking at these figures we see that the list is
headed by the chief mining districts — Durham,
Northumberland, and South Wales. They form a
group apart, with annual rates of drunkenness im-
mensely in excess of those found in the other counties.
But if we look at the place of these districts in the
list of alcoholism, the result is entirely different.
Durham — a long way the most drunken county in
5
ALCOHOLISM.
Table I. — Arrests for DrunhennesSj Deaths from
Alcoholism and Cirrhosis of the Liver , and Attempts
to commit Suicide in the Counties of England,
and in North and South Wales (Annual Average
per 100,000 of the Estimated Population in the
Decennial Period 1891 to 1900).
Arrests
for
Deaths fron
alcoholism
I At-
tempts
Counties.
drunken-
and
cirrhosis of
to
commit
ness.
the liver.
suicide.
Durham .
. 2228-8
. 15-90
. 4-32
Northumberland
. 1643-8
. 22-36
. 6-37
South Wales .
. 1012-9
. 13-61
. 2-59
Lancashire
. 806-4
. 25-29
. 6-57
Metrop. and adj. Counties ^ 748-7
. 24-18
. 9-43
Stafford .
. 695-4
. 18-86
. 3-69
Cumberland
. 689-7
. 14-92
. 2-47
Worcester
. 676-4
. 19-50
. 5-38
Shropshire
. 661-3
. 22-91
. 3-36
York (West Riding)
. 644-1
. 16-67
. 4-17
Monmouth
. 629-3
. 12-81
. 2-22
York (East Riding) .
. 620-7
. 15-97
. 4-55
Warwick .
. 599-2
. 24-70
. 8-56
North Wales .
. 569-9
. 16-07
. 1-99
Cheshire .
. 546-2
. 20-48
. 4-72
Lincoln .
. 542-9
. 13-85
. 4-14
Nottingham
. 541-7
. 18-03
. 5-85
Derby-
. 510-1
. 20-44
. 3-94
York (North Riding)
. 475-7
. 15-67
. 2-87
Hampshire
. 390-9
. 19-61
. 7-82
^ The metropolis is here combined with the counties which con-
tribute to the police district : Middlesex, Surrey, Hertford, Kent,
and Essex.
SOCIAL CAUSES OF INTEMPERANCE. 67
Table I (continued).
Counties.
Arrests
for
drunken-
Devonshire
Westmoreland
Sussex
Hereford .
Northampton
Gloucester
Leicester
Berkshire
Somerset
Cornwall
Huntingdon
Dorset
Norfolk .
Bedford .
Wiltshire
Oxford
Rutland .
Suffolk .
Cambridge
Buckingham
343-7
340-8
312-5
297-8
296-4
290-7
261-5
252-6
246-7
230-1
210-0
209-5
200-7
184-5
172-6
161-5
153-9
143-1
100-6
97-0
Deaths from
alcoholism
and
cirrhosis of
the liver.
15-38 .
18-03 .
22-32 .
15-50 .
13-66 .
14-41 .
16-19 .
17-79 .
19-70 .
8-50 .
17-69 .
13-10 .
15-39 .
17-75 .
15-44 .
16-22 .
18-39 .
14-61 .
19-82 .
21-76 .
At-
tempts
to
commit
suicide.
4-32
2-14
4-78
3-47
6-73
4-93
4-62
4-82
4-67
1-11
2-01
3-69
2-77
1-80
2-62
3-88
1-49
2-12
1-77
2-80
England — has an alcoholic death-rate which ranks it
with the sober agricultural districts; while South
Wales, third highest in the list of drunkenness, is the
lowest but three in the list of alcoholism. And
Northumberland, which ranks high in both lists, is
only an apparent exception to the same rule, for its
excessive alcoholism is due simply to the dominant
68 ALCOHOLISM.
influence of Newcastle-upon-Tyne^ which contains 37
per cent, of the population of the county, and which,
as a seaport and a centre of the metal trade, is in-
dustrially under quite different conditions. The exclu-
sion of Newcastle would reduce the rate of suicidal
attempts to 3*3 per 100,000, which indicates a degree
of alcoholism near the average in the agricultural
counties, but the rate of drunkenness would still stand
at 1348*8. In these mining counties, therefore, we find
drunkenness without alcoholism, a condition which,
as we have said above, indicates pure convivial excess.
In predominantly manufacturing counties, on the
other hand, such as Warwick or Lancashire, drunken-
ness, which, though less than in the mining districts,
is still excessive, coincides with a very high rate of
alcoholism : this is the mark of industrial drinking.
And, finally, in counties like Suffolk, Norfolk, or
Cornwall, which are mainly agricultural, we have low
rates both of drunkenness and of alcoholism, indicat-
ing that there is little tendency to either convivial or
industrial excess.
The dependence of chronic alcoholism on industrial
conditions which is traceable in this table is, of course,
more clearly shown by the differences in the death-
rate from alcoholic diseases in the several occupational
groups. On this point the returns of the Registrar-
General supply us with very complete information,
the essential matter of which is shown in Table II,
giving the comparative mortality figures from alco-
holism alone and from alcoholism and liver diseases
taken together, in the larger occupational groups.
The " comparative mortality figure " from any given
SOCIAL CAUSES OF INTEMPERANCE. 69
Table II. — Comparative Mortality Bates from (a)
Alcoholism and (b) Alcoholism and Liver Diseases
taken together, in the larger Occupational Groups
(Census o/1891).
Alcoholism and
Alcoholism.
Liver Disease.
Agriculturists
. 4 .
. 21
Coal-miners
. 4 .
. 21
Railway engine-drivers
. 4 .
. 22
Textile workers
. 7 .
. 30
Quarriers, etc.
. 8 . .
. 23
Shoemakers
. 9 .
. 29
Coach and carriage makers 9 .
. 35
Railway labourers
. 10 .
. 27
Printers
. 10 .
. 40
Building trades
. 11 .
. 34
Metal workers .
. 11 .
. 40
Bakers .
. 11 .
. 50
Tailors .
. 12 .
. 43
Messengers, porters, etc.
. 15 .
. 31
Carmen, carriers
. 17 .
. 44
Merchant seamen
. 21 .
. 60
Coach and cab service
. 28 .
. 61
Butchers
. 35 .
. 91
Dockers
. 52 .
. 78
Publicans, etc.
. 94 .
. 268
In Scotland :
Farmers and graziers
. 3 .
. 20
Miners .
. 5 .
. 20
Masons and bricklayers
. 11 .
. 31
Greneral labourers
. 14 .
. 30
70 ALCOHOLISM.
disease in any given occupation indicates, it will be
recalled; the number of deaths from that disease that
would occur in a population corresponding in number
and in age constitution to the standard population, but
engaged only in the given occupation. These figures
are therefore for purposes of comparison the best avail-
able measure of alcoholic proclivity in the different
forms of industry. The figures which we give in
Table II are taken from the census reports of 1891,
and refer to the period 1890-1892. To show that the
results are not an accidental feature of the English re-
turns, figures are also given from the Scotch tables for
those industrial groups in which the number of deaths
during the triennial period exceeded a thousand.
It will be noted that the figures in this table con-
firm fully the view that the distribution of alcoholism
in the counties is to be interpreted as a result of
industrial conditions. Thus the low rate of alcoholic
mortality and of suicidal attempts in the great
mining counties, despite their high rate of drunken-
ness, corresponds with the relative immunity of coal-
miners from alcoholic disease. And this immunity,
it will be observed, is equally evident amongst coal-
miners beyond the Border, though in the Scottish
mining districts, as in Scotland generally, drunken-
ness is even more prevalent than in England. Dif-
ferences in procedure make comparisons on this
point of doubtful value ; but if we assume that arrests
for breach of the peace and for drunkenness repre-
sent very much the same thing as arrests for
drunkenness in this country, we find that the pro-
portion of such offences per 100,000 of the inhabitants
SOCIAL CAUSES OF INTEMPERANCE. 71
was on an average during the period 1897-1901 in
the three largest mining counties of Scotland as
follows: Fife, 1460; Ayr, 2150-3; Lanark (ex-
cluding Glasgow), 2619.
Again, the greater alcoholism of the counties with
large manufacturing centres is similarly in accord
with the higher mortality figures for alcoholism that
rule in the textile and still more in the metal trades,
as well as in the lower sorts of transport labour.
To make the matter still clearer, we may have
recourse to the method already referred to, of form-
ing composite areas each representative of special
industrial conditions, and seeing how they stand in
respect of drunkenness and of the various forms of
alcoholic crime. This method is used with excellent
effect in the criminal statistics ; and for our present
purpose we cannot do better than to adopt the same
selection of districts that is made therein : in addition
to being admirably representative, it has the great
advantage of being clearly free from bias.
The areas that best exhibit the contrast of indus-
trial conditions are, in the criminal statistics, made
up as follows : Agricultural counties (county police
districts only) — ^Norfolk, Suffolk, Hunts, Cambridge,
Dorset, Hants, Somerset, Wilts. Manufacturing
towns — Birmingham, Blackburn, Bradford, Derby,
Halifax, Hanley, Huddersfield, Leeds, Leicester,
Nottingham, Oldham, Preston, Sheffield, Wolver-
hampton. Seaports — Birkenhead, Cardiff, Hull, Liver-
pool, Newcastle-on-Tyne, Newport (Mon.), South-
ampton, South Shields, Swansea, Tynemouth. Mining
counties — Derbyshire (excluding Derby borough).
72
ALCOHOLISM.
Durham (excluding Hartlepool, South Shields, and
Sunderland), Grlamorgan (excluding Cardiff and
Swansea), Monmouth (excluding Newport), North-
umberland (excluding Newcastle and Tynemouth).
Comparing drunkenness in these areas with the
offences that are known to be of- predominantly
alcoholic origin — suicidal attempts, homicide, and
Table III. — DrunJcenness, Homicidal Crime and As-
saults, Homicidal Grime alone, and Attempts to
commit Suicide in Composite Areas of Special
Industrial Character {Annual Average per 100,000
of Estimated Population during the Tears 1891—
1900) ; with Comparative Mortality Bates from
(a) Alcoholism and (b) Alcoholism and Liver
Diseases tahen together in Certain Occupational
Groups (Census of 1891).
Areas.
Annual average per 100,000
inhabitants.
Comparative mortality-
figures.
1
111
III
1
if
1
8
Occupational
groups.
Agricultural
counties . .
226-3
116-33
303
3-46
4
21
Agricul-
turists.
Manufacturing
towns . . .
479-8
265-73
5-33
6-42
{.:
30
40
Textile
workers.
Metal
workers.
Seaports . . .
990-6
409-73
14-73
10-56
52
78
Dockers.
Mining
districts . .
1091-2
237-94
6-34
2-43
4
21
Coal miners.
SOCIAL CAUSES OF INTEMPERANCE. 73
Agricultural Manufacturing
counties. towns
Table III — continued}
Seaports.
Mining
counties.
a be
a
a
b d
>i >, . I Alcoholism
Agriculturists. ^^^^^^
II.
Alcoholism
and liver
diseases . 21
30
Metal
workers.
11
40
Dockers.
52
78
Coal
miners.
21
homicidal crime and assaults taken together — we get
the figures of Table III, which are also graphically
expressed in the accompanying diagram.
These results, then, fit in perfectly with the evi-
dence we examined above. In the mining industry
we have much drunkenness, more than in any other
industrial group ; but we have very little alcoholism
— the comparative mortality figure of coal-miners
1 a. Drunkenness, b. Homicide and assaults, c. Homicidal
crime, d. Attempted suicide.
74 ALCOHOLISM.
for alcoholic disease we saw to be the same as that
of the agriculturists, and lower than in any other
occupational group. And similarly, alcoholic
suicide — as represented by suicidal attempts, which
we shall subsequently see to be a very fair index of
the chronic intoxication — is rare, and homicide, which
is, of course, largely connected with drink, is, rela-
tively to the enormous prevalence of drunkenness,
.rather infrequent.
\ In the manufacturing towns, the centres more
particularly of the textile and iron industries, we
have a good deal of drunkenness, though much less
than in the mining counties ; and we have in the
great industrial groups of the textile workers and
the metal workers rates of alcoholic mortality nearly
two and three times as high as in the coal-miners.
And here, again, we find that alcoholic suicide, and
in a great measure homicide too, corresponds with
the degree of alcoholism rather than with the degree
of drunkenness.
\ Next, in the seaports, which are more particularly
centres of casual transport labour, and of ship-
building, we have again a very high rate of drunken-
ness, approaching even that in the mining districts.
And the industrial groups, which — though, of course,
very imperfectly — represent in some sense seaport
conditions — iron workers, seamen, and most of all,
dockers — show very high alcoholic death rates : the
comparative mortality figure of dock labourers from
alcoholic disease is, in fact, only exceeded by that of
the liquor trade group. We have here, therefore,
much drunkenness and much chronic alcoholism :
SOCIAL CAUSES OF INTEMPERANCE. 75
and at the same time we have the maximum pre-
valence of alcoholic suicide and of homicide.
Lastly, in the agricultural districts we have only
the most moderate amount of drunkenness, suicidal
attempts, and homicidal crime, and in the corre-
sponding industrial group we have a very low rate
of alcoholic mortality. 1^.^-.^.*^--
So far, then, as the statistical evidence goes, it fully
supports the positions stated earlier in this chapter.
It proves that drunkenness and alcoholism are so far
independent phenomena that the maximum of drun-
kenness may coincide with the minimum of alcoholism ;
and it shows further that the tendency to chronic alco-
holism is mainly connected with the mode of industry.
And, finally, this evidence confirms the view, to
which the study of alxjoholism in the individual has
already brought us, that the relation of alcoholic
suicide and of alcoholic homicide is, not to simple drun-
kenness, but to chronic intoxication. In the chapters
on racial degeneracy and on insanity we shall see
reason to believe that, so far as these evils are due to
drink, the same statement holds true ; they also depend,
not on drunkenness, but on chronic intoxication.
Nearly all the graver social evils, therefore, that
are wrought by alcohol, and which alone give to the
drink question the importance of a social problem,
are eifects of chronic alcoholism, and are, therefore,
traceable in the main to the industrial drinking
which is the chief source of the chronic intoxication.
In a word, we may say that for all practical purposes
the whole problem of alcoholism is the effect and
development of industrial drinking.
CHAPTEE VI.
INDUSTRIAL DRINKINa IN THE OCCUPA-
TIONAL GROUPS.
In the last chapter it was seen that the surest
inferences to be drawn from the statistical evidence
regarding alcoholism in this country are, that all the
graver social results of excess are connected with
chronic intoxication and not with simple drunkenness,
and that the main source of this chronic intoxication
is to be sought in the use of alcohol as an industrial
V stimulant.
And it was further pointed out — what is, indeed,
an evident corollary to this view — that, owing to
variations in their industrial conditions, different
trades differ very widely in their tendency to this
form of drinking and therefore in their proneness to
alcoholism. The extent of these differences we saw
to be manifest on contrasting the death-rates from
alcoholic diseases in the several occupational groups.
What we have now to discuss in more detail is
the character of this industrial drinking, and the
nature and mode of operation of the influences which
produce it. Obviously such an inquiry, even if of a
very limited and superficial kind, is beset with con-
INDUSTRIAL DRINKING. 77
siderable difficulty. The numerous forces^ biological
and economic^ whose complex interaction determines
the alcoholism of a given industrial group may vary
widely in their direction and activity according to
circumstances of time and place ; and the drinking
habits which are their resultant must necessarily show
some corresponding diversity of character, so that
even in occupations which are fairly homogeneous
and well defined the alcoholic practice may differ
somewhat in different districts or in different factories.
And this is, of course, more likely to occur in trades
where the workers are ordinarily distributed into
such small groups that the influence of individual
peculiarities in reaction to alcohol are shown on an
exaggerated scale.
As a rule, however, the differences that arise from
these causes are not so great as to prevent the
recognition in each form of industry of certain general
tendencies which are common to all its developments,
and which give to its alcoholic tradition a more or
less characteristic stamp.
In order, therefore, to acquire a clear idea of the
facts of industrial alcoholism and of the causes which
underlie them, we cannot do better than to start from
the investigation of these characteristic tendencies as
they reveal themselves in the more important branches
of industry. This will be the matter of the present
chapter, which will give a summary account of the
drinking habits in a number of the chief trades in
this country, and will endeavour to show the relation
of these habits to the special conditions of labour that
belong to each trade. The facts have been ascer-
78 ALCOHOLISM.
tained by personal investigation amongst men engaged
in the several occupations, the witnesses being chosen
in such a manner and in such numbers as to represent
each industry under a sufficient variety of conditions.
The information so obtained has been further con-
trolled by the evidence of persons connected with the
liquor trade in various centres of working-class life.
Waterside labour. — Under this heading are com-
prised a number of more or less distinct varieties of
work, differing in character according to the several
stages of the process of loading or unloading, or
according to the class of materials to be handled.
The stevedores, for instance, who stow cargo, or the
ship-workers who unload from vessels in mid-stream,
are, to some extent, specialised groups as compared
with the labourers who handle the goods on the
quays or in the warehouses. And, similarly, men
who deal with grain or timber form distinct categories
from the ordinary docker.
These different sorts of work will necessarily differ
somewhat in the local conditions under which they
are carried on, in the skill they require, and in the
pay by which they are remunerated ; and such differ-
ences may, of course, in some degree react on the
drinking habits of the workers. The variations that
are thus brought about are, however, for the most
part of slight degree ; throughout all its subdivisions
the homogeneity of the group is preserved by the
essential sameness in the nature of the effort, in its
demand for sudden spurts of energy rather than for
skill; and though there may be some dissimilarity
in regard to such circumstances as the accessibility
INDUSTRIAL DRINKING. 79
of liquor, it is rarely sufficient to cause any consi-
derable deviation from the general drinking customs.
The few instances in which marked departures from
the common type are found will come in for separate
examination when we have dealt with the class as
a whole.
The social status of the group is low. In Booth's
statistics it is estimated that about 14,562 men are
employed in riverside labour in London, and of this
number the proportion living under very crowded
conditions, i. e. where there are three or more indi-
viduals to a room — amounts to 28*4 per cent. As
regards wages. Booth concludes from his investiga-
tions that " the ordinary rank and file of dockers
earn at their trade from about 21s. at most to about
8s. a week."
In common dock labour work starts generally be-
tween 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. ; pay is at the rate of Qd.
an hour, with a higher scale for special sorts of
work; wages are paid every evening, or earlier if
the job is finished, and after a few hours' work a
man can, as a rule, have a " subb.,'' or advance, from
the foreman. Night work, which is fairly frequent,
is, of course, more highly paid.
Besides the regular intervals for breakfast and
dinner it used to be a general practice to recognise
what were known as " bever times " ^ — i. e. pauses for
refreshment, one in the forenoon and one in the
afternoon, each lasting some fifteen minutes. Of
late years most of the employers have withdrawn
their official sanction from these bever times, but
* See page 111.
80 ALCOHOLISM.
the tradition is still pretty faithfully observed through
the greater part of the docks.
These intervals, therefore, with the regular meal
times, fix the common habits of the industrial drinker
in dock labour. Before starting work in the morn-
ing he will take a "livener/^ consisting of a half-
quartern of rum in coffee, or "a happorth and a
pennorth" (a half -glass of ale and a tot of gin), or
a glass of ^' four ale " ; at breakfast he will have
about a pint of ale after the meal, or possibly a
larger quantity, with hardly any solid food; from
one to three half-pints will be the allowance for the
first bever time ; a pint or two will be taken with,
or in lieu of, dinner ; and at the second bever time
about the same amount as in the forenoon. On
knocking off work he will have a pint or two more,
bringing up his total industrial drinking for the day
to something over six pints as a minimum. The
drinking at the dinner hour is very often like that
which goes on in the evening after work, of the
convivial sort; at the other intervals it has usually
the industrial characteristic of being solitary.
In general, the facilities for getting liquor during
working hours at the docks are practically unre-
stricted. The official repudiation of the bever times
has, it is true, been followed up on the part of some
firms by efforts to prevent the introduction of beer
on the jetties ; but unless these efforts are seconded
by a particularly enthusiastic and energetic fore-
man they are not of much influence. Ordinarily the
men can go out or send out for beer as often as
they wish, employing in the latter case usually one
INDUSTRIAL DRINKING. 81
of the dock loafers who pick up a living in this
fashion, receiving as remuneration for their services
the penny deposit paid on the pint bottle.
Some of the shipping firms are said even to take
a part in organising the liquor supply on their
jetties; they grant to some favoured employee the
'exclusive right to fetch in beer at the bever times,
the amount served out to each man being then
booked and deducted from his pay at night. This
practice used to be more common, but has been
checked of recent years by prosecutions for beer
hawking and as a violation of the Truck Act.
As can be readily 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 ordi-
nary 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 alco-
holism; 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.
As a rule the liquor of the dock labourer is " four
ale.'' Rum, however, is often taken as the morning
livener, especially in cold and damp weather. It is
used as the regular industrial stimulant only by a
6
82 ALCOHOLISM.
small proportion of dockers — not more probably than
one in twenty.
As far as general impressions can be trusted re-
garding such a matter, it would appear that a
majority of dock labourers are industrial drinkers,
who also go in for convivial excess. Men, however,
who are pure convivial drinkers are not uncommon;
and a small though apparently increasing propor-
tion are teetotalers. Intemperance is, of course,
more frequent among the casual hands than amongst
the men in fairly regular work, and is much less
common amongst the dock servants, who form a
separate category altogether.
The average habits of the industrial drinker at
the docks are fairly well illustrated in the two
following examples of regular hands, one an
unmarried labourer and the other a married man
with children.
(1) T. M — , single, aged 48 years. Suffers from
gastric catarrh, bronchitis, and nervous symptoms
of alcoholism ; has had several attacks of delirium
tremens. In fairly steady work. Average daily
wage 4s. Qd. Takes three solid meals, each of which
costs him sixpence at the cook-shop : for breakfast
he has a rasher and two eggs, two slices of bread
and butter and tea ; for dinner he usually takes
beef-steak pudding, cabbage, and potatoes ; tea is
similar to breakfast, with probably fish in lieu of the
rasher. His " doss ^' costs him another sixpence.
The balance of his wages, 2.s-. 6d., he spends practi-
cally all on liquor, partly in industrial drinking at
I UNIVERSITY I
INDUSTRIAL DRINKING. 83
the usual intervals, and the rest in a convivial
carouse after work.
(2) G. M — , stevedore, aged 32 years ; married,
two children. Suffers from gastric catarrh, with
vomiting of blood ; latterly develops dream-conscious-
ness after alcohol, and is subject to hallucinatory
attacks. Is in regular work, and often does over-
time, so that he makes on an average as much as
6s. Qd. a day. Of this sum, he gives 4.s. 6d. to his
wife, on which she keeps herself and the children,
and refunds him his dinner money next day. The
2^. which he retains goes mainly for industrial
drinking ; he takes no breakfast, but works on beer
alone up to the dinner-hour, when he makes a solid
meal at the cook-shop. He takes very little con-
vivially.
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 limited number of
men, each man paying a nominal deposit for his
knot ; the porter then starts work, receiving at the
warehouse door for each box he takes in a brass
ticket marked with the amount of his fee, Id., 2t/.,
or Sd., according to the size of the box. These
tickets he can get changed for money later in the
day by the clerk, or he can bring them at any time
to a public-house which enjoys the special privilege
84 ALCOHOLISM.
of cashing them, the porter taking a certain pro-
portion of their value in drink. The second alterna-
tive is, of course, nearly always adopted, and, as a
consequence, a large number of these men do their
work almost exclusively on beer. As soon as its
effect is sufficiently visible to suggest risk of accident
the man has to give up his knot for the day, and
is replaced by a fresh hand. These conditions
produce the maximum development of industrial
alcoholism.
Tea porters usually work in gangs on a contract
system, being paid daily at the ordinary dock rate
of 6d. an hour, and then getting at the end of the
job whatever balance is left on deducting the money
so paid from the contract price. This " plus money "
gives an opportunity for convivial excess in addition
to the regular industrial drinking.
Coal wharfers are in somewhat the same position
as ordinary dock labourers, but their drinking tra-
ditions are even more vigorous ; over and above the
forenoon and afternoon intervals for liquor, they
recognise a third regular pause for " going to mug,^"*
midway between the starting of work and the break-
fast hour.
All these forms of unskilled labour furnish the
conditions most favourable to industrial drinking ;
and it is, in fact, largely to their influence that we
must attribute the excessive prevalence of alcoholism,
which, as we have already pointed out, is a charac-
teristic of the seaport towns.
Other forms of unshilled transport labour. — The
porters at the various provision markets, coal-heavers^
INDUSTRIAL DRINKING. 85
carmen, etc., work under conditions that are very-
similar to those of waterside labour. They have the
same need of sudden spurts of hard muscular effort;
and from the circumstances of their calling, their
drinking propensities are free from any control by
their employers, and are therefore limited only by
their own discretion and by the want of ready cash.
Industrial drinking, accordingly, is very general
amongst them.
We may take the coal-heavers as an illustrative
instance. The average coalie will start the day with
a livener of rum and coffee on his way to the wharf,
and will then go on for the rest of his time with
" four ale " at the rate of a half-pint for each
delivery, of which, of course, there may be several
in the two-ton load ; he will then wind up with a
convivial drink after putting up his horse and cart
in the evening.
The proportion of coal-heavers who follow an alco-
holic regimen of this sort is very large. In one
yard, for instance, where the conditions appeared
fairly representative, the gang of fifteen men was
found to be made up of three teetotalers, one pure
convivial drinker, and eleven industrial drinkers- of
the type we have described.
In many respects cabmen, and to a less extent
tram and bus drivers, are connected with this class,
and have accordingly a similar disposition to steady
industrial drinking which is reflected in their high
death rate from alcoholic disease.
The huilding trades. — The several occupations
comprised under this heading form a rather complex
86 ALCOHOLISM.
group when examined with regard to their drinking
habits ; for in the industrial conditions that have
most influence on these habits there are very wide
differences, not only between mechanics and labourers
and between the different classes of mechanics, but
also between men of any given category when working
for small masters and men of the same category
working for big firms.
The differences of the former sort are partly shown
in the wages and housing of the different classes.
Mechanics, for instance — i. e. bricklayers, carpenters
and so forth — according to Booth, may be taken to
earn on an average (in London) about 325. a week,
allowing for irregularity of employment, while under
the same circumstances the labourer's wage would
not come to more than 28s. Sd. As regards housing,
very crowded conditions — i. e. three or more persons
to a room — were found by Booth in 15*4 per cent, of
the class as a whole, ranging in its several sub-
divisions from 10 per cent, and 12 per cent, amongst
carpenters and plumbers respectively to 24 per cent,
amougst bricklayers.
Throughout the trade industrial drinking is very
prevalent, and its general type is essentially the
same with mechanics and their labourers, though, of
course, the grosser work and lower social conditions
of the latter class tend to make their drinking more
excessive in absolute amount, and still more relatively
to their other diet. This type of drinking used to
be, and in all the smaller firms still is, very like that
in vogue amongst dock labourers; that is to say,
there is the early morning livener, the regular
INDUSTRIAL DRINKING. 87
breakfast and dinner-hour drinks, and the drinking
at the forenoon and afternoon pauses. At the latter
times it is usual for a labourer to be sent out to a
neighbouring public-house to fetch in the beer;
and sometimeSj though not often, in the building
trades, a particular house will have the privilege of
sending in a potman to take orders.
Where beer can be sent for in this way, and where
no restrictions are imposed on bringing it in when
coming to work in the morning, and after meals, it
is possible for the industrial drinker to have liquor
by him all day long, and instances of this sort are
by no means uncommon, especially amongst old
hands.
Wages are paid weekly, but in small firms a
"sub." for beer can generally be had when desired ;
and frequently a man who cannot obtain such an
advance from his own employer will find a pal who
is working for a small master and will share his
sub.
Even where no sub. is given in actual cash, it is
often allowed virtually by the foreman guaran-
teeing the workman's credit at the public-house and
deducting the amount of the debt at the end of the
week. Without some such arrangement publicans
are very chary of giving credit to men in this trade
owing to their irregular and nomadic habits.
As in other occupations, it is the custom for the
industrial drinker in the building trade to go in also
for convivial excess, and exceptions to this rule are
rare. On the other hand, a fair proportion of the
men who drink convivially take little or no liquor
88 ALCOHOLISM.
during working hours. The relative frequency of
those two modes of drinking varies, of course, enor-
mously in different groups of workmen. As an
example of the most favourable state of things we
may take this estimate of an intelligent workman in
the carpenters' shop of a large London firm : ac-
cording to his reckoning, of 120 mechanics working
with him about twenty were teetotalers, fifty steady
industrial drinkers, and fifty moderate convivial men,
possibly going a little over the mark on Saturdays.
Amongst men doing other work for the firm, either in
the shops or on the job, the proportion of industrial
drinkers would be rather higher, even taking account
of mechanics only, and very much higher if builders'
labourers were included.
As has been said already, there is a considerable
difference between large and small firms in regard to
the conditions of industrial drinking. The small
master, whose work is rarely of the kind that will
suffer much from a little unsteadiness of hand, does
not usually make difficulties about frequent sending
out for beer, and will generally be ready to provide
a sub. for its purchase. Moreover, as he is not
expected to find a mess-room, with a boy to do the
cooking, there is a tendency on the men's part to
scamp their regular meals. The big employer, on
the contrary, dealing with more complex and dan-
gerous undertakings, may very often have sufiicient
motive to restrain the drinking habits of his workmen;
and, as he is in a position to give more constant and,
therefore, more valued work, and to draw his supply
of labour from a wider area, he has no need to
INDUSTRIAL DRINKING. 89
truckle to their weaknesses. Accordingly he gives
no sub. ; frequently he forbids the bringing in of
liquor on his works^ and he compels his hands to
confine their drinking to the regular intervals, or he
may suppress the forenoon and afternoon pauses
altogether, or may allow them only for non-alcoholic
refreshment. Of recent years there has been an
increasing tendency in large firms to impose restric-
tions of this kind ; and on all big jobs where there is
risk of accident, as, for instance, in the erection of
sky-scrapers, it is now the general rule that men can
get liquor only at the breakfast and dinner hours.
There is still, however, a good deal of diversity of
practice amongst employers as regards both the tenor
of their regulations on this matter and the stringency
with which they are enforced.
As a result of such differences as we have indicated,
we find in the building trade a very wide range of
variation in the drinking habits of the men ; thus the
mechanic in the employ of a big firm is very much in
the position of a skilled factory operative, and has a
relatively moderate tendency to industrial alcoholism,
while the bricklayer's labourer working for a petty
master is under conditions practically identical with
those of the docker, and follows a similar alcoholic
regimen. For the trade as a whole it seems probable
that the average drinking usage is nearer the lower
than the upper limit on this scale. And this opinion
would be in accord with the position of the building
trade group in the list of alcoholic mortality.
Carriage building.— The relatively small occupa-
tional group of the carriage builders may be referred
90 ALCOHOLISM.
to here in passing as a further, and in some respects
a more instructive, illustration of the point which we
have just discussed in connection with the building
trades, namely, the difference in the drinknig customs
of the workers according as they are in the employ-
ment of large or small masters. The interest which
carriage building presents from this point of view
depends on the curious sort of reversion in industrial
conditions which the growth of specialisation has
brought about in London. In the provinces the
state of things is very similar to what we find in
other trades — that is to say, the big firms work
under conditions like those in most factories; they
usually prohibit the bringing in of liquor, and they
will not recognise the forenoon and afternoon pauses
for refreshment. On shoeing days, it may be re-
marked, these rules are often relaxed in favour of
the smiths, but in general they are said to be very
well enforced. Small provincial masters, of course,
are for the most part less rigorous.
In London, on the other hand, the trade is or-
ganised after a quite different fashion ; the big
metropolitan firms do not directly employ the men
who are engaged in their factories, but they contract
with a ^' piece-gaff" for each portion of the work,
and the piece-gaff then hires his men. These piece-
gaffs are, therefore, more or less in the position of
small masters, and their attitude towards the drink-
ing habits of their men is in general marked by the
same laxity ; there are practically no restrictions on
sending out for liquor, and in many houses the
visiting potman is an established institution. More-
INDUSTRIAL DRINKING. 91
over^ as tlie piece-gaff system makes for sweating
and for irregularity of employment, it has in this
way a further tendency to promote intemperance.
As a result of this difference in conditions it is said
that in the carriage trade alcoholism is much more
prevalent in London than in the provinces, and that
despite the fact that in the Metropolis there are, of
course, a larger number of men in the industry
engaged on specially delicate work, such as armorial
painting and the like, which by its character excludes
regular drinking,
Gas-stohimj. — The men engaged in this work are
of the same class industrially as the dockers and
the builders' labourers, and a good number of the
casual hands pass from one group to the other,
doing stoking in winter, and going to the docks or
the brickfields or the building trade in summer.
At the gas-works the usual custom is to distribute
the work between three eight-hour shifts, changing
by weekly or fortnightly rotation. A shift includes
several groups of men, each group having to manage
such a number of sets of retorts as will allow one
set to be drawn and recharged every hour. At a
fairly brisk rate of work this task can be got
through in half an hour, and the remainder of the
time is then free for rest and refreshment.
These conditions allow of a good deal of industrial
drinking. The men can bring in liquor on coming
to work, and on the day shifts it is usual to permit
them to go out for refreshment, twice in the earlier
and once in the second shift ; or in some places a
potman visits at corresponding intervals and takes
92 ALCOHOLISM.
orders for beer. There are practically no restric-
tions as to the amount drunk, except, of course, that
obtrusive intoxication is not allowed. It is said that
some years ago it was the practice to make the men
a beer allowance whenever the temperature in the
works exceeded a certain limit, which under these
circumstances it was found to do with remarkable
frequency.
Wages are paid weekly, and no sub. is given ;
but there is a good deal of borrowing amongst the
men, and regular hands can commonly get credit at
the public-house. The system of alternating shifts,
which interferes with fixed meal-times, appears in
some instances to tend to a greater reliance on alcohol,
but its influence in this direction is probably not
very great. Alcoholism is extremely prevalent.
Glass-blowing. — In this skilled occupation the
nature of the muscular effort and the influence of
the heated atmosphere tend to further industrial
alcoholism very much as in gas-stoking, which it also
resembles in the system of alternate weeks of day
and night work. The drinking tradition is corre-
spondingly strong, and the industry ranks high in
the scale of alcoholic mortality.
In a very few London firms attempts have been
made, especially of late, to prohibit the introduction
of alcohol during working hours, but such cases are
exceptional; in the majority of glass-works no re-
strictions are placed on the frequency of sending
out for liquor or on the amount brought in. As
payment is for piece-work the employer has as a rule
no particular interest in the matter.
INDUSTRIAL DRINKING. 93
Wages are paid on Saturday ; the sub. is unusual,
borrowing from fellow-workmen being the more
general practice.
In this industry tradition appears to have a con-
siderable force in fixing and preserving the drinking
customs ; this seems to be largely due to the
system of work in groups or '^ chairs/' which, as it
requires a fairly accordant degree of speed and
efficiency in each of the three men — the finisher and
the two blowers — who make up the chair, tends to
impose uniformity in such habits as have an in-
fluence on working capacity.
Metal trades. — The complexity in social and indus-
trial circumstances which was noted as a difficulty
in treating of alcoholic habits in the building
trades is still more evident in the heterogeneous
group of the metal workers. Many industries are
connected with each metal, and many specialised
processes belong to each industry, so that there is a
great deal of diversity in the character of the work,
and this is naturally apt to bring about more or less
important differences in many of those conditions
which react most potently on the drinking customs.
Nevertheless, it is but rarely that such differences
are so marked as to obscure the underlying identity
of the main determining influences in all these
industries; even where they are most obtrusive
their effect, as a rule, is limited to causing some
relatively slight deviations from the type of indus-
trial alcoholism characteristic of the whole group.
We shall have occasion later on to point out some
instances of this sort.
94 ALCOHOLISM.
In general, metal-workers have always been noted
for their strong alcoholic tendencies ; their occupa-
tion, through the amount of muscular effort it
frequently entails, and through the over-heated
atmosphere in which much of it is pursued, is
obviously apt to encourage industrial drinking. And
in an earlier period in the history of the trade this
effect was apparently accepted without question ;
Le Play, for instance, refers to alcohol as a seemingly
'^ indispensable ^' part of the diet of workmen of this
class. Subsequently, as machinery became more
complex and its applications more general, and as
the increasing stringency of factory legislation
stimulated the employer's interest in the safety of
his workers, efforts began to be made to restrain
this disposition to alcoholism. These efforts, how-
ever, had to fight against an extremely strong
tradition, embodied very usually in the persons of
the foremen, who, being themselves survivors of a
process of alcoholic selection, set much store by their
own capacity for heavy drinking, and were ready to
compel the new-comer to submit to the same test of
efficiency. In many works, more particularly in the
North of England, this state of things still to some
extent persists ; the workman who does not conform
to the drinking usages of the shop will soon be made
to feel in innumerable ways that his presence is not
wanted. And even where the old tradition does not
give rise to an active antagonism of this kind, it is
very likely to produce an attitude of indifference in
the more responsible workers which goes far to
nullify the effect of any measures of restraint adopted
INDUSTRIAL DRINKING. 95
by the employers. For, in labour which may involve
so strong a tendency to industrial drinking, it needs
the energetic supervision of the foremen and over-
seers to check the surreptitious introduction of
alcohol. Efforts to smuggle in liquor are, in fact,
made more frequently and with more ingenuity in
the metal trades than in almost any other industry.
Bottles, for instance, are often concealed in the
buckets of drinking-water, or are hauled up through
the windows ; spirits are put in the tea-cans or carried
in pocket-flasks.
Accordingly where, as is the more usual custom,
the bringing in of stimulants is formally forbidden,
the observance of the rule will depend very largely
on the special circumstances of the shop. In the
Government yards, where men are liable to be
searched to prevent the theft of official secrets, this
practice naturally hinders the smuggling of liquor
as well, and some private factories at all events
appear also to take fairly effectual measures against
drinking on their premises.
On the whole, the tendency for several years past
has been very decidedly in the direction of greater
stringency. Many small masters, however, still
tolerate the forenoon and afternoon beer times, and
some of them allow special arrangements for the
delivery of liquor from a privileged public-house,
and in a few instances large firms follow the same
practice, or even run canteens on their works.
Moreover, of course, in some branches of the
metal trades, where the system of piece-work is in
force and where the yards are open, the men are
96 ALCOHOLISM.
practically free to drink as much as they please.
Under such circumstances the drinking habits ap-
proach the type fouiid in waterside labour, especially
when, as is the case with anchor-smiths and chain-
makers, the work is pursued in connection with
seaport industries. This latter inj&uence is also
responsible for the alcoholic habits of the semi-casual
class of marine-repairing engineers.
It was remarked above that in this group of
industries special variations in the character of the
work are met with, which are apt to modify the
tendency to industrial drinking. Sometimes these
variations operate to increase, sometimes to diminish,
the alcoholic bent. Puddlers, for instance, and
blacksmiths are reputed to be particularly heavy
drinkers ; and in the case of enamellers, whose work
is extremely arduous and unpleasant, a spirit ration
is sometimes even allowed by the employers.
On the other hand, in the more skilled and
delicate work, such as that of the pattern-makers,
the disadvantages of alcoholic unsteadiness are so
well recognised by the workers that industrial
drinking is quite exceptional. Similarly, brass-
casters, whose finer craft demands very keen touch
and quick and accurate movement, cannot do their
work on beer.
It is interesting to note that the alcoholic death-
rates in the several divisions of the metal workers
seem to show traces of these differences ; for in-
stance, while the comparative mortality figures, from
alcoholism alone, and from alcoholism and liver
diseases taken together, in the whole class are re-
INDUSTRIAL DRINKING^. 97
spectively eleven and forty, the corresponding figures
amongst brass- workers are sensibly lower, namely,
nine and twenty-nine ; while in the group which in-
cludes anchor- smiths and chain-makers, they are
rather higher, namely, twelve and forty-two. These
differences are suggestive, though, of course, they
are too slight, and, in their origin, too open to fallacy,
to bear any great stress of inference.
Textile industries. — In the textile factories the
facilities for industrial drinking are limited as a rule
in very much the same way as in the large iron-
works; that is to say, the bringing in of liquor by
the men is forbidden, and no interruptions in the
working day are recognised except for breakfast
and dinner.
Since the labour is, in general, much less exacting
than in the metal trades, and involves correspondingly
less motive for the use of stimulants, these rules are,
on the whole, fairly well observed, and the drinking
habits of the textile workers compare favourably
with those of most of the other occupational groups
living under urban conditions.
This relative freedom from alcoholism is, however,
of comparatively recent acquisition, and is in a great
measure due to the alterations in the hours and cir-
cumstances of labour which have been brought about
by the Factory Acts. Formerly, when no limitations
were placed on the length of the working day, and
when there was no compulsion on the employer to
provide proper ventilation in his shops, the labour in
the textile trades was, by reason of its excessive
duration, and the foul and dust-laden atmosphere in
7
98 ALCOHOLISM.
which it was carried on, one of the most arduous and
exhausting in the whole field of manual industry ;
and, as we saw in the introductory chapter of this
book, it produced accordingly a wide and vigorous
development of industrial alcoholism. Other causes
have, of course, helped to bring about the better
state of things that now exists, but the chief influence
in the change has unquestionably been the factory
legislation, and the effects it has thus wrought are a
striking illustration of the extent to which intem-
perance can be modified by improvements in the
industrial conditions of the workers.
In this connection we may also note that the large
amount of female labour in the textile industries,
though it tends through its disorganisation of home
comfort to promote alcoholism, has in other ways a
beneficial influence on the general tendency of
factory life in relation to drinking habits; for, as
common opinion is less lenient to intemperance
amongst women and at the same time more disposed
to consider their comfort, employers have usually
been more ready in the textile factories than else-
where to provide decent refreshment rooms on their
premises, and in these advantages the male hands
naturally have their part. In this respect several
of the cotton mills in the North of England are quite
admirably equipped.
Sometimes, no doubt, employers, especially those
w^ho work on a small scale, adopt a rather laxer
attitude towards the drinking habits of their men ;
the introduction of beer is connived at, and liquor
can be sent out for at regular times in the working
INDUSTRIAL DRINKING. 99
hours ; but instances of this sort appear to be rela-
tively few and are on the decrease.
The lesser prevalence of industrial drinking
amongst the textile workers accounts for their com-
paratively low rate of mortality from alcoholic
diseases. On the other hand, their tendency to con-
vivial excess is fairly strong, and this applies to the
women workers no less than the men ; in both sexes
a drunken spree is still a not uncommon way of
signalising the completion of a good piece of work.
Of late, however, more civilised manners are coming
into vogue, and drunkenness is ceasing to be the
mark of good fellowship
Boot and shoe makers. — The industrial conditions
in this occupational group are so various and so
complex, and moreover have been so unstable of
recent years, that it is hardly possible to find any
common denominator for them that will be of much
practical utility. This fact, however, though it is, of
course, a serious impediment to generalisations re-
garding the drinking traditions of the trade, helps
at the same time to make its study rather instructive
on many points of detail, for it enables us to see
within the narrow compass of a single craft, the
different effects produced by variations in several
influences that have a large part in the genesis of
industrial alcoholism.
The production of the machine-made boot, to
which, as it forms by far the larger and more im-
portant branch of the trade, the following remarks
will be wholly directed, comprises several stages.
The pieces of the upper are first cut out by the
100 ALCOHOLISM.
clickers, who are usually men or youths, and are
then passed on to the machinists, commonly girls, by
whom they are sewn together. The rough-stuff
cutters and other workmen meanwhile prepare the
soles. Soles and uppers nre then fixed together by
the boot-lasters, from whom the work goes finally to
the finishers. The groups of workers who are
concerned with these successive stages form distinct
categories, the conditions of whose labour may be so
dissimilar as to constitute from our point of view
practically distinct trades. Up to a few years ago,
indeed, this was the case to such an extent, especially
in London, that the bulk of the work was distributed
amongst outside workers, who might never come in
contact with one another. Thus the clickers and the
rough-stuff cutters worked in the employer's shop,
but the closing of the uppers and the lasting were
given out. And in the provinces it was customary
to have the work cut and prepared, and then to send
it on for lasting to the neighbouring villages. Under
this system the outside workers were, of course, free
from any restrictions with regard to drinking, and
industrial alcoholism was accordingly rather prevalent
amongst them. In 1895, however, the Trade Union
was strong enough to carry out a strike against this
out-work system, and since that date factory organi-
sation has been on the increase in the boot trade
both in London and in the provinces, with the result,
it is said, that the drinking habits of this class of
operatives have considerably improved. In the
larger factories, at all events, the state of things
now is very similar to what we have fonud in other
INDUSTRIAL DRINKING. 101
industries ; that is to say, the men are not free
to go out except at the regular meal-times, and the
introduction of liquor during the working hours is
forbidden. And these regulations have been pretty-
well enforced, at least within the last few years,
largely because the keenness of competition in the
boot trade has been such that even with piece work
it has been a matter of consequence to the employer
to secure a maximum of speed and efficiency from
his hands in order to get the utmost return for his
outlay on rent and power ; and he has been more
able to make these demands because the scarcity of
employment has given him a greater freedom of
choice and action. It is only in very rare instances
that laxer practices are found in large shops. More-
over, in many of the boot factories the organisation
of cheap restaurants has latterly been improved ;
and some of the co-operafcive societies in particular
have made admirable catering arrangements on their
works.
On the other hand, the smaller shops, as wo
saw to be the case with other trades, do little or
nothing to interfere with industrial drinking ; and
in the boot trade the number of such shops is ex-
tremely large, since the necessary plant for a start
can be acquired with a capital of a few pounds.
Moreover, in connection with petty undertakings of
this sort there is a good deal of subordinate employ-
ment and sweating, which, by their influence in
lowering the standard of living, tend to promote
alcoholism.
Where the out-work system persists there is, of
102 ALCOHOLISM.
course, ample opportunity for industrial drinking,
and this is further encouraged by a peculiar arrange-
ment only met with in the boot trade, namely, the
associated workshop, a room which the men club
together to hire, each man providing his own light
and appliances, and working whatever time he
pleases. This system, which used to be common,
especially in the bespoke trade, is now dying out.
On the whole, then, we may say that in this occu-
pational group industrial drinking is probably very
limited in amount, and is tending to decline amongst
the workers in the factories ; but that the bootmakers
working under other conditions, either as jobbing
hands, or in the employment of petty masters, etc.,
are tolerably alcoholic.
Printing. — As in several of the trades we have
discussed in this chapter, the different sorts of
printing work vary within a pretty wide range, in
the character of the labour they involve, the regu-
larity of employment, the hours of work, and other
details, many of which have a modifying effect on
the drinking habits. Broadly speaking, the average
conditions are of a kind strongly to promote indus-
trial alcoholism, and their variations are for the most
part in a direction that is more likely to increase
than to diminish this general tendency. A very
vigorous and deeply-rooted drinking tradition would
seem, indeed, to have been a characteristic of this
industry from an early period of its history.
Franklin, for instance, writing nearly two centuries
ago of the printing-house in which he worked while
in London, says : " The beer-boy had sufficient em-
INDUSTRIAL DEINKING. 103
ployment during tlie whole day in serving this house
alone. My fellow-pressman drank every day a pint
of beer before breakfast, a pint with bread and
cheese for breakfast, one between breakfast and
dinner, one at dinner, one again about six o'clock
in the afternoon, and another after he had finished
his day^s work. ... He had need, he said, of all
this beer in order to acquire strength to work.'* It
is a striking illustration of the stability of industrial
manners that this description is substantially as
applicable to the London printer of to-day as it was
to his predecessor in the early years of the eighteenth
century.
In most of the houses doing commercial and book
printing the custom is, indeed, almost exactly as in
Franklin's account. That is to say, the regular
forenoon and afternoon intervals are recognised,
when beer can be sent out for, or can bo ordered
from the potman of a public-house enjoying the ex-
clusive right of entry on the premises. As in other
industries, there are firms which do not countenance
this practice, and some even take active steps to
discourage drinking, but such instances appear to bo
relatively rare in the printing trade.
Even amongst women employed in connection
with this sort of work, drinking during the hours of
labour is very general ; girls, for instance, who work
at book-folding take their lunch and tea beer after
the same fashion as the men, and are similarly
prone to suffer from alcoholism.
Printers engaged on newspaper work are under
even laxer conditions than those we have just de-
104 ALCOHOLISM.
scribed. There is usually little difficulty in passing
in and out of the office, and as in the intervals
between getting out the different editions the men
are practically unoccupied, it is customary to make
frequent adjournments to the public-house. Drink-
ing under these circumstances has a convivial
element, the common practice being to toss for pots
of ale. On the night shifts there is necessarily less
opportunity for frequent drinking, but as a rule a
man can bring in a supply of liquor to last him until
the hours of opening in the morning ; and up to
some years ago a few public-houses near Fleet
Street enjoyed by a tacit understanding the privi-
lege of opening at 2 a.m. for the benefit of thirsty
printers.
The irregularity of employment which is inci-
dental to certain branches of this industry has also
an influence on the drinking habits. A large
number of men, for instance, depend almost entirely
on casual work on weekly papers, being taken on
just before publishing day. These " grass hands ^'
while waiting for a job naturally gravitate to the
public-houses specially patronised by their trade,
and, indeed, if not society men, generally stand a
better chance of being picked up there than they
would anywhere else.
In general, throughout the trade there seems to
have been hitherto very little effort on the part of
employers to discourage industrial drinking, and very
few attempts have been made to provide restaurant
facilities for the hands. Possibly in part for this
reason there appears to be less difference in alcoholic
INDUSTRIAL DRINKING. 105
habits between tlie different grades of workers than
is usually found in industries with a hierarchical
division of labour. The compositor, whose work de-
mands quickness and accuracy and whose pay is
liberal, is not as a rule much more temperate than
the printer's assistant, engaged at heavy labouring
tasks on lower wages; such difference as exists in
their drinking habits affects the price and quality of
their potations rather than the amount. It is only
latterly and, as yet, to a slight extent, that there are
signs that increasing competition is giving a higher
value to the sober printer.
On the other hand, there are some highly skilled
crafts connected with this industry in which the
character of the work compels a departure from
this tradition of free drinking ; and since very fre-
quently the interests of the employer are nearly
concerned in these instances, the men's appreciation
of the advantages of abstinence is reinforced by
precautions against the introduction of liquor. In
lithographic printing, for example, where the exact
superposition of the sheet on the successive stones is
of vital importance, a muddled workman, making a
blunder at a late stage of the process, will probably
destroy all the value of his previous work, so that
the employer will lose heavily over material and
labour. In most lithographic shops accordingly —
probably in quite 70 per cent. — active steps are taken
to prevent beer being brought in ; and where
intervals for refreshment are allowed, non-alcoholic
canteens are often organised.
These special classes, however, are not sufficiently
106 ALCOHOLISM.
large to modify perceptibly the intemperance of the
printing industry as a whole ; we find, accordingly,
that the occupational group ranks high in the alco-
holic scale, its comparative mortality figure from
alcoholism and liver disease being nearly the same
as that of the building trades and the metal-workers.
The very large proportion of the trade that is carried
on in the alcoholic atmosphere of the Metropolis no
doubt contributes to this result.
Goal-mining. — Li this industry the conditions that
determine the drinking habits of the workers are
uniform and distinctive to a degree which we do not
find in any other occupational group. Whatever
differences may exist between the coalfields of one
district and those of another, and however these
differences may affect the methods of working, they
are as nothing compared with the characters that
are shared in common, and which, from our point of
view at all events, make all coal-mines essentially
alike. Of these characters, besides the general
similarity in the muscular work involved in coal-
getting, the most important are the constantly large
scale of the operations, which prevents those contrasts
between large and small employers so frequently met
with in other trades; the length of the spells of
work which, owing to the difficulty of access to the
place of labour, are more prolonged than in other
industries ; and, finally, the extreme danger of
drunkenness in the pit, a danger which, as it affects
many interests, leads to a correspondingly rigorous
supervision of the sobriety of the individual work-
man.
INDUSTRIAL DRINKING. 107
As a result of all these conditions the impediments
to industrial drinking are greater in coal-mining
than in any other form of manual labour. By the
circumstances under which he works the miner is
practically cut off from all access to liquor during
the eight or ten hours which he spends in the pit.
He is inspected before he goes down the shaft, to
secure that he is absolutely sober ; and in many
mines a man will be stopped if he even smells of
liquor. He is forbidden to take any alcohol down
with him ; and as his clothing is very light, and as,
moreover, he is liable to be searched for matches
and tobacco, he has very little chance of successfully
smuggling in liquor, while if detected in the attempt
he has to face dismissal and possibly prosecution.
Besides, the spirit of solidarity will naturally dis-
courage a practice fraught with danger for the
whole body of workers, and will lead to the prompt
denunciation of any offender.
In the result, therefore, the coal-miner has at
most an opportunity for having a single dose of
alcohol before he gets to work, and as its stinmlant
effect does not last long he speedily realises that
beer is a " muddling ^' thing to work on. Amongst
miners, accordingly, industrial drinking is practically
unknown, though, as we have already noted, they are
remarkably prone to convivial excess, the weekly or
fortnightly pay-day being the occasion for a wild
orgie, in which rum mixed with ale is one of the
favourite tipples.
The high pay, of course, which miners receive
favours this convivial tendency, at the same time
108 ALCOHOLISM.
that it tells against alcoholism by allowing the
adoption of a higher standard of living.
Owing to their relative freedom from industrial
drinking, coal-miners, as we saw in the last chapter,
show a remarkably low rate of alcoholic mortality,
ranking, in fact, with the agriculturists and below
all the other industrial groups.
Industries employing women. — In dealing with
the textile trades and with printing we have had
occasion to touch on the question of alcoholism
amongst women in its relation to industrial occupa-
tion. Something more than this incidental treat-
ment, however, seems to be required by the import-
ance of the subject, and we therefore propose in
this last section of the present chapter to supplement
our previous references by a short discussion of the
question as a whole.
The domestic occupations which are the chief
field of women^s activities lie outside the scope of
this essay, and we need only remark in connection
with them that they obviously allow ample oppor-
tunity for the continuance of alcoholic habits formed
prior to marriage. This is a matter of much
importance, for the ordinary existence of the work-
ing man's wife, with its succession of pregnancies
and sucklings, and the management of a brood of
children in cramped surroundings, will of itself be
very likely to promote tippling; and if a knowledge of
the effect of alcohol as an industrial excitant has been
acquired by the factory girl, it is pretty sure of
further development in the married woman. In-
stances of this sort, in which the discomforts of the
INDUSTRIAL DRINKING. 109
first pregnancy stimulate the growth of a rudimentary
habit oi: industrial drinking to confirmed intem-
perance, are tolerably common in any wide experi-
ence of the alcoholic.
Leaving this matter aside, however, and confining
our attention to the ordinary wage-earning occupations
of women, we may observe that, speaking generally,
their alcoholic proclivity is very much as we find to
be the case with men, that is to say, it is less when
the work is carried on in large factories than when it
is done in small shops ; less when it is timework than
when it is piecework, with the relative liberty which
the latter system usually involves ; and, of course,
less when the labour is skilled and delicate than
when it is of the coarse, muscular kind. These
different influences are naturally found in various
combinations. In laundry work, for instance, the
relatively severe character of the labour outweighs
the other conditions, so that even when the work is
done in large establishments the drinking tradition
is tolerably strong, and many big employers will
allow the introduction of beer during work-hours ;
in textile work, on the other hand, as we have
already seen, the factory organisation is the decisive
influence, and is sufficient of itself to control the
tendency to industrial alcoholism.
In occupations where male and female labour are
closely associated the result of their mutual influence
appears to be somewhat variable. If there is a strong
motive on the part of the employer to restrain
drinking, and if the character of the labour and the
other circumstances are favourable to the success of
110 ALCOHOLISM.
his efforts, then it seems likely that the presence ot a
large proportion of women workers makes for sobriety :
the textile workers are a case in point. On the other
hand, where such favourable conditions are absent, it
is the rule that women working at or in connection
with a trade where the alcoholic tradition amongst
the male workers is strong will in a large measure
adopt that tradition, quite irrespective of whether
the character of their own labour does or does not
involve any intrinsic tendency to industrial drinking.
Thus, girls employed at book-folding, as was pointed
out above, commonly follow the same usages as the
printers, though their work is not of a particularly
arduous sort. And in the nail- and chain-making
industry in the Black Country the women who work
along with the men in the small shops are said to
drink very much after the same fashion as their male
comrades, and suffer similarly from alcoholic disease.
In this case, it is true, the character of the labour
and the conditions under which it is pursued might
be expected in any event to produce industrial
drinking.
Another matter to be borne in mind in this con-
nection is that in the less organised forms of industry
the casual woman worker often belongs more or less
definitely to the prostitute class, which is, of course,
extremely prone to alcoholism — prostitution being,
indeed, for obvious reasons an occupation that in-
volves an exceptionally strong tendency to industrial
drinking. This circumstance contributes materially
to further alcoholism in the lower ranks of female
labour.
INDUSTRIAL DRINKING. Ill
In these very cursory remarks we have considered
the industrial employment of women in relation to
alcoholism only in so far as it affects the habits of
the women workers themselves. It has, however,
another influence of wider range to which we have
already had occasion to refer, namely that which it
exercises indirectly through its reaction on home
life. This influence plays a very important part in
promoting alcoholism. For the employment of
women in the ordinary industrial occupations not
only involves a disorganisation of their domestic
duties if they are married, but it also interferes with
the acquisition of housewifely knowledge during
girlhood. The result is that appalling ignorance of
everything connected with cookery, with cleanliness,
with the management of children, which makes the
average wife and mother in the lower working class
in this country one of the most helpless and thriftless
of beings, and which therefore impels the workman,
whose comfort depends on her, not only to spend his
free time in the public-house, but also tends to make
him look to alcohol as a necessary condiment with
his tasteless and indigestible diet. Both directly and
indirectly, therefore, the employments that withdraw
women from domestic pursuits are likely to increase
alcoholism, and, it may be added, to increase its
greatest potency for evil, namely its influence on the
health of the stock.
Note on " 6et;er.''— This word, derived from the
Italian hevere, Old French heivre, was a name
given to any refreshment taken between the regular
112 ALCOHOLISM.
meals^ and more particularly to the afternooii colla-
tion. The following examples of its use are quoted
in ^ Notes and Queries ' (Oct., 1859) : " Betimes in
the morning they break their fast, at noon they dine ;
when the day is far spent they take their beaver;
late at night they sup ^^ (^ Gate of Languages/ 1568).
" He is none of those same ordinary eaters that
will devour their breakfasts, and as many dinners,
without any prejudice to their bevers, driukings and
supper " (Beaumont and Fletcher, " The Woman
Hater,'' Act I, Scene 3).
At the present time it survives only in the speech
of the working classes, especially in the neighbour-
hood of London, with the sense referred to in the
text, of a drink between meals. Its use is most
frequent amongst unskilled labourers ; it is rarely
employed by artisans.
CHAPTEE VII.
THE FACTORS OF INDUSTRIAL DRINKING.
Having examined in some detail the alcoholic
habits in the several occupational groups, we are
now in a position to put together our salient results
in a more general survey of the factors of industrial
drinking, considering them in their relation to the
physiological action of alcohol and to the present
state and apparent tendencies of industry in England.
The most important and most obvious of our results,
readily to be recognised in all the manual trades which
we have dealt with, is the intimate connection of in-
dustrial alcoholism with the nature of the muscular
and nervous effort involved in each particular sort of
work. This connection we may express in the general
proposition that the tendency to alcoholism depends
on the balance between need of force and need
of skill, reaching its maximum in the crude forms of
transport labour, where brute strength is almost the
sole requirement, and being at a minimum in the
delicate crafts which make more demand on keenness
of perception and accuracy of muscular adjustment.
This fact is, of course, simply the confirmation in the
actual conditions of manual labour of the conclusions
8
114 ALCOHOLISM.
of the laboratory, whicli showed, as we saw in
Chapter III, that the value of alcohol as an indus-
trial stimulant depends altogether on its facilitating
the discharge of energy and so increasing the output
of muscular work, while its influence on sensory
function — on sensation, perception, and co-ordination
— is constantly unfavourable. The relation, therefore,
which the special character of the labour in each
form of industry bears to this regular action of
alcohol will in the long run decide the alcoholic
tendency of the average worker in that industry,
and will so, in a large measure, determine its drink-
ing tradition. And in like manner the various
departures from this tradition on the part of indi-
vidual workers can very often be accounted for by
their peculiarities of reaction to the drug. In some
subjects, for instance, as we learned from the psycho-
physical experiments, alcohol stimulates motor func-
tion with little or no disturbance of sensory function ;
such individuals, therefore, may be industrial drinkers
even in a trade that demands a high degree of
delicacy and skill. In other persons, on the con-
trary, the amount of sensory disturbance is so great
and develops so early that it interferes with the
performance of even coarse muscular work, so that
though industrial drinking be the custom of their
trade, they are forced to be abstinent during the
hours of labour ; this is the explanation of their
habits that is given by many purely convivial drinkers
engaged in occupations where industrial alcoholism
is rife.
The first condition, then, we repeat, for the
FACTORS OF INDUSTRIAL DRINKING. 115
development of industrial drinking is that the cha-
racter of the work should be such that the effect of
alcohol on its performance will be felt by the worker
as beneficial, or, at all events, will not be perceived
as immediately detrimental. This is the fundamental
factor, and the other conditions that enter into the
causation of industrial alcoholism, and which in
many cases may appear to play a larger and more
direct part, are operative in the main simply through
reinforcing this primary influence.
Of these conditions, the facility of access to liquor
during the working day is obviously the first in
importance ; it must, indeed, be regarded as also in
itself an indispensable factor in this form of drink-
ing; for, as we have already pointed out, the use of
alcohol as a stimulant for work is only possible when
the dose can be frequently repeated, so that its
excitant effect may be kept up, and the onset of
secondary depression may be avoided. When such
frequent renewals of the stimulant influence are
prevented, as occurs, for instance, when restrictions
are placed by the employer on drinking during the
hours of labour, then the workman is quickly made
to realise, by actual experience, that the sense of
increased energy that he gets from alcohol is of very
brief duration, and that it has to be paid for by
a degree of reactionary fatigue which considerably
overbalances the initial gain in working capacity.
It is for this reason, because by breaking the
continuity of the intoxication they destroy the
prestige of alcohol, and not, of course, because they
diminish the daily drinking by a couple of pints of
116 ALCOHOLISM.
beer, that such restrictions exercise an important
retarding influence on the development of industrial
intemperance. We see this most clearly in those
forms of labour where, while the restrictions on
drinking are effectual, the spells of work are long
enough to allow the ultimate disadvantages of
alcohol to become clearly apparent. Coal-mining is
a very good illustration of these conditions : the
miner has practically no chance of getting liquor
during his time under ground ; his only opportunity,
therefore, for using alcohol as an industrial stimulant
is immediately before he goes to work ; and as a
single dose will not carry him very far in an eight-
hour shift, he soon arrives at the conviction that
beer is no good for his particular sort of labour.
Accordingly we find, as we have already pointed
out, that in this industry, instead of the superstitious
belief in the strength-giving virtue of alcohol which
is common in most forms of work that demand severe
muscular effort, there is quite a contrary tradition,
so that, though coal-miners are extremely addicted
to convivial excess, they are practically free from
industrial alcoholism.
In factories where the introduction of liquor is
forbidden, and where the riiles to that effect are
properly enforced, the conditions are somewhat
similar, but their influence in discouraging industrial
drinking in the intervals of labour — that is to say,
before starting work in the morning and during the
dinner-hour — is less efficacious, for, since the spells of
work are not so long, there is less time for the
depressing action of alcohol to make itself felt.
FACTORS OF INDUSTRIAL DRINKING. 117
That it does, nevertheless, become apparent even in
these shorter periods, is shown by the expedients to
which industrial drinkers will have recourse in order
to smuggle in liquor, especially when the character
of the work, as frequently in the metal trades,
involves a considerable output of muscular energy.
For the full development, however, of the use of
alcohol as an industrial stimulant, we must go to
those forms of unskilled labour where access to
liquor during the hours of work is practically free
from restriction. In these circumstances, since the
worker can always renew the excitant influence as
soon as he is aware of any slackening of energy, ho
is never compelled to feel the secondary depression
that alcohol induces, and he accordingly retains a
firm belief in its value as an aid in muscular work.
This, as we have seen, is the condition that wo find
generally in waterside labour and in the lower
ranks of the building trade, which are the groups,
therefore, that best illustrate the characteristics of
industrial alcoholism.
In these groups the customary beer-times, together
with the regular meal-hours, fix what we may regard
as the normal type of industrial drinking, in which
liquor is taken before starting work in the morning,
at breakfast, at dinner, and at least once during the
forenoon and once during the afternoon spell of
labour, so that throughout the working day alcohol
is regularly resorted to at intervals of not more than
two hours. As to the quantity drunk we may pro-
bably take as a fair average for the confirmed
industrial drinker the amount set down to the typical
118 ALCOHOLISM.
docker, described on p. 80. The minimum daily
allowance, as there shown, came, it will be re-
called, to about six pints of " four-ale,'' which,
assuming for the liquor an alcoholic strength of 4
per cent., would amount to nearly 5 oz. of absolute
alcohol. This would be about three times the
quantity usually held to be requisite to produce the
degeneration of chronic alcoholism. Its effect in
this way would, as we have already pointed out, be
much accelerated by the deficiency of other diet,
which is a common condition in the lowest ranks of
the labouring class, and which is exaggerated by
the expenditure of so large a share of the total
income on the purchase of liquor. Such underfeed-
ing is also, of course, in itself an important factor
in causing industrial drinking, through the lack of
strength and energy which it produces. So that in
this double way, by encouraging the use of alcohol
and aggravating its detrimental action, it contri-
butes largely to bring about the constant association
of alcoholism with the worst-paid forms of labour,
which is one of the most striking facts that we meet
with in the investigation of intemperance. In this
same connection we may also note that the irregu-
larity of employment which is very common in these
forms of labour has a like tendency to promote
industrial drinking; the labourer who starts on a
fresh job after a period of enforced idleness, with
the low living which is its usual accompaniment, will
necessarily be for a time in a state of nervous and
muscular inefficiency, for which alcohol will obviously
be an apparent and to some extent a real remedy.
FACTORS OF INDUSTRIAL DRINKING. 110
This is an influence which often has a considerable
part in laying the foundation of a habit of working
on alcohol.
Generally speaking, ale is the liquor taken by the
industrial drinker. This preference may possibly bo
due in some part, as we have suggested, to the
carbohydrates in beer, giving it a real advantage
in a diet for muscular work over the more purely
alcoholic beverages ; but the main cause is more
probably to be found in its apparent cheapness, for
though there is not much difference as regards
alcoholic value between the amount of rum and of
" four-ale " that can be purchased for the same sum,
the " big penn'orth " looks the better bargain. For
this reason spirits are commonly regarded as a more
aristocratic sort of drink, and workmen who habitually
take beer will, on great occasions, when in funds,
stand treat in whiskey or brandy. There are also,
of course, a certain proportion of industrial drinkers
who go in regularly for spirits. They are most
numerous amongst the metal workers, especially in
the North of England, where the spirit-drinking
tradition has always been fairly strong, and where,
though it seems now to be losing ground, the con-
sumption of whiskey is still relatively larger than in
most other parts of the country. The casual observer
can see a rough indication of this local difference in
the much smaller number of beer engines to be found
in the average tavern of such a town as Newcastle
compared with a house of the same class in London.
Very often, too, men getting on in years, and men
suffering from the gastric symptoms of alcoholism.
120 ALCOHOLISM.
will substitute spirits for some part of tlieir daily beer.
And spirits in the form of rum^ either alone or with
coffee or ale, is also very frequently chosen as the
morning "livener^'; and as this drink is taken on an
empty stomach the use of such a concentrated form
of alcohol has, of course, a peculiarly injurious effect.
This " livener '' or '^ freshener/^ whatever be its
composition, always plays a very important role in
industrial drinking and in the transitional stage be-
tween the convivial and industrial forms of drinking,
being the natural remedy for the unsteadiness left
after a week-end carouse. We find, accordingly,
that conditions which stand in its way, notably the
late opening of public-houses, have a very material
effect in checking the growth of alcoholism. Thus
the greater prevalence of industrial drinking in
London as compared with the provinces, and in the
latter as compared with Scotland, is probably in a
great measure due to the fact that beyond the
Border the public-houses are not accessible till
8 a.m., while in the British provinces they open at
6 a.m., and in the Metropolis at 5 a.m. In public-
houses with a large clientele of industrial drinkers
this morning livener, which is almost a sine qua non
to the confirmed alcoholic subject, is a very consider-
able item in the day^s business. In London taverns
in poor neighbourhoods, for instance, as much as a
third or more of the trade will often be done before
8 a.m., at which hour a house dealing with better-
class artisans will hardly have its shutters down.
And in the provinces publicans close to large fac-
tories which start work at (3 a.m. find it well worth
FACTORS OF INDUSTRIAL DRINKING. 121
their while to cater specially for this morning custom
by having the glasses ready filled before the doors
are opened, so that the men may have just time to
swallow their morning dram on the stroke of the
legal hour of opening. This can be seen at the
gates of several of the large iron works in the North
of England.
The chief check on this early morning drinking is,
then, the statutory limitation of the hour of opening.
Drinking during the dinner and breakfast intervals
is, of course, practically free from any direct outside
control. On the other hand, drinking during the
spells of work, which, as we have seen, counts for a
great deal in the development of industrial alcoholism,
largely depends on the will of the employer, who
may or may not take steps to prevent the introduc-
tion of liquor on his premises. Formerly, at all
events, the motives that decided his attitude on this
matter would not, as a rule, bring him into opposition
with the alcoholic tendencies of his men, for they
were related in very much the same way to the
character of the work. That is to say, the restric-
tions that the employer placed on drinking during
work hours were, generally speaking, proportioned
to his sense of the risk that his material or machinery
might run at the hands of a fuddled workman ; and
since that risk was commonly greatest in skilled and
delicate work, and least in labour of the gross mus-
cular sort, it came about very usually that the
restrictions were severest where the alcoholic tendency
was least and least where the alcoholic tendency
was greatest.
122 ALCOHOLISM.
Within recent years, however, this state of things
has altered. The growing use of machinery is more
and more diminishing the field of labour in which
force is of more importance than skill ; and even in
that narrowing field many influences, amongst which
the increased stringency of the Employers' Liability
Acts is the most potent, are combining to give the
employer a livelier interest in discouraging alcoholism
amongst his workers. The effect of these changing
conditions was referred to when describing recent
developments in the building trade.
Again, the shortening of the hours of labour in
many industries has tended in the same direction :
it not only magnifies the importance of the slightest
diminution of individual eflSciency, such as alcohol
may produce, but it also makes the loss of the ten
or fifteen minutes at each beer-time a matter of real
concern to the employer. And even in industries
where piece work is customary the increasing keen-
ness of competition often has a similar effect : it so
narrows the margin of profit that the employer, in
order not to lose on his outlay for rent, light, and so
forth, will keep his men to regular Ijours, and will
not allow the waste of time and skill that industrial
drinking is apt to involve.
Under all these influences, accordingly, there is
in most trades a growing disposition to put a stop
altogether to drinking during work hours. Naturally
this movement meets with a good deal of resist-
ance, particularly in industries where the alcoholic
tradition is long and firmly rooted. For, as must
be constantly borne in mind in discussing the indus-
FACTORS OF INDUSTRIAL DRINKING. 123
trial drinking of a trade,, what we have really to
deal with is not so much the actual alcoholic ten-
dencies dependent on the work as an organised
tradition which, though the outcome of these
tendencies in the past, has a vitality of its own
stronger than the original influences that formed it,
and capable of surviving their cessation or decay.
It is this tradition, rather than his own sensation of
nervous or muscular fatigue, that impels the neophyte
in a trade to adopt the drinking usages of his fellows,
to start his day, for example, with the freshener of
rum after the manner of an old hand. The force of
this tradition, as can be readily understood, is
strongest in the trades where an inherent alcoholic
tendency is associated with a high specialisation of
skill, bringing the new-comer into a relation of de-
pendence on his seniors. This we observed to be
the case, for instance, in the metal trades and in
glass-blowing. In such trades the stoppage of
drinking during work hours can only be enforced
with great difficulty.
In many industries, of course, there are instances
of employers who stand out of the general move-
ment, and continue, for example, to allow the system
of regular beer-times. This is particularly apt to
occur when they or their representatives have a direct
interest in the sale of liquor. Sometimes the firm
runs a canteen on its own account ; and sometimes
it makes or allows the manager to make an arrange-
ment with an individual publican giving him the sole
right to sell beer in the factory during working
hours. Allied to this latter system is the custom, to
124 ALCOHOLISM.
which we have already referred, of the foreman
guaranteeing the men^s credit for industrial drinking
at the favoured public-house, the account being
settled on the weekly pay-day. For his part in
the transaction the foreman gets a commission
from the publican, generally at the rate of 25. 6d.
in the pound. More elaborate plans to the same
end are also in vogue : in London, for instance, it is
sometimes the practice for the publican to issue brass
tickets stamped with different values, from Id. to Sd ;
these he hands over to the foreman of the " tied
factory '^ at a discount ; the foreman gives tbem out
to the men on demand as an advance on wages, aud
the publican then honours them in liquor according
to their face value.
, All these arrangements have a very important
influence, because they remove the main indirect
restraint on the tendency to industrial drinking —
the workman^s want of ready cash. This difiiculty
is, of course, greatest in the lower ranks of unskilled
labour, where industrial alcoholism is most rife. In
the absence of some such method as we have just
described, it is ordinarily got over, either by the
" sub.^* from the employer after a few hours^ work,
or by the more usual way of borrowing. The money-
lenders in the latter case are very generally the
teetotalers of the group, who, no doubt as a solace
to their outraged convictions, commonly charge in-
terest to their unregenerate comrades at the rate of
a penny in the shilling per week. The profits
realised through this system of petty usury are thus
very considerable ; and an appreciation of them is
FACTORS OF INDUSTRIAL DRINKING. 125
often found to act as one of the most effectual
incentives to temperance. Their value as an object-
lesson of this sort has been rather amusingly-
illustrated by the enterprise of a zealous temperance
reformer ; this ingenious individual, who was the
treasurer of the local branch of one of the large
total abstinence societies, hit on the admirable idea
of lending out the funds in his charge amongst his
alcoholic fellow- workmen, and in this way increased
his capital to such an extent that within six months
he was able to present his branch with a banner
which, by reason of its intrinsic magnificence as well
as the circumstances of its origin, is the envy of all
teetotaldom.
The effect of the various conditions which we have
referred to in promoting industrial drinking is,
moreover, very largely reinforced by the relative
scarcity of proper means of procuring good and
palatable food. This remark applies more particu-
larly to the classes of unskilled and casual labour.
In factories the state of things is in this respect
generally better ; the workmen more often live near
enough to take their meals at home ; and where this
is not the case, it is at least fairly common for the
employers to make provision for the supply of dinner
on the works at reasonable terms. Some of the
railway companies, and many of the big metal and
textile firms in the North of England, have organised
well-equipped restaurants for this purpose ; and it is
said that there are cotton mills in Yorkshire where
the solicitude for the comfort of the hands extends
even to the providing of instrumental music during
12G ALCOHOLISM.
the dinner-hour ! As was remarked in speaking of
the textile industry, these matters are usually better
arranged in trades that engage a large proportion of
female labour, though, unfortunately, the beneficial
effect as regards alcoholism which is so produced is,
perhaps, more than balanced by the disorganisation
of home life and the loss of housewifely capacity
that result from the employment of women in factories.
Of course, employers differ very widely in their atti-
tude on this matter ; and the instances of enlightened
care for the dietary arrangements of the workers,
such as we have just referred to, are still much more
the exception than the rule, even in highly organised
forms of industry. There can, however, be little
doubt that the tendency which they indicate is
showing signs of rapid development, and must
continue to grow in strength when further experience
has convinced the employers how much they stand to
gain through the superior efficiency of the well-fed
and temperate workman.
So far, accordingly, as the higher ranks of the
working classes are concerned, the influence of de-
fective dietary in promoting alcoholism is certainly
on the decline. With unskilled and casual labour,
on the other hand, where this influence has always
been more powerful, the outlook is less encouraging.
The difficulties to be encountered are obviously very
much greater ; the home conditions are ordinarily
worse, and the level of domestic capacity in the
women is lower. It is, therefore, chiefly in the
direction of organising cheap restaurants that a
remedy for the evil must be sought ; but, unfortu-
FACTORS OF INDUSTRIAL DRINKING. 127
nately, in this form of labour there is naturally much
less motive for the employer to interest himself in
the circumstances of his men, so that the provision
of such restaurants is for the most part left to inde-
pendent enterprise, either aiming at profit or working
for purely philanthropic ends. In the latter wa}^ a
great deal has been done, especially of late years;
and in most of the regular centres of unskilled labour
the workman, even on a very low scale of pay, can
now procure, without much trouble and at a price
within his means, good food in sufficient quantity
and properly cooked. This last detail is of particular
importance from our point of view, for it is probably
the monotonous and unpalatable character of his
ordinary diet, even more than its inadequate amount
and defective quality, that inclines the workman to
combine it with an excessive quantity of beer. Food
which has undergone what the average housewife in
the English proletariat fondly imagines to be cooking
is pretty sure to stand in need of an alcoholic condi-
ment, especially if, as is frequently the case, it has
to be eaten cold or re-heated. And it is hardly a
matter of surprise that the tired labourer will often
lay more stress on the sauce than on the viands, and
will be ready, if he can find a purchaser, to sell the
domestic mess for a pot of ale.
As the larger scale of their operations enables
them to give more value for the money in the
amount, in the variety, and in the preparation of the
food which they furnish, the philanthropic restau-
rants are better able to compete with the public-
houses than are the ordinary coffee-shops ; and the
128 ALCOHOLISM.
multiplication of these institutions is, therefore, a
valuable means of indirectly combating industrial
alcoholism amongst the unskilled labourers. Of
course, until the employers of this class of labour
give the restaurant the same sort of advantage
that it has in the big factories, where there is no
access to the public-house during the hours of
work, the beer-drinking tradition will be able to
hold its own; and it is impossible, therefore, to
expect under existing circumstances that very great
modifications can be immediately brought about in
the alcoholic habits of the casual labourer. And
this fact, we may note in passing, suggests some
doubt as to whether these philanthropic restaurants
are entirely wise in their rigid insistence on the
teetotal principle. There is some likelihood that the
sudden and complete suppression of the accustomed
alcoholic condiment may create in the uneducated
mind a prejudice against the most irreproachable
diet ; and, as a matter of fact, old industrial
drinkers will very often complain of the tastelessness
of the food they get in the temperance restaurants,
compared with what they bring with them from
home and eat in the public-house. This judgment
of a vitiated stomach, however worthless intrinsi-
cally, has its effect on the opinion of a not very
discriminating public, and fosters the feeling of
distrust that is so easily awakened against any
philanthropic enterprise. On this account it seems
probable that, better and more speedy results might
be obtained by a less uncompromising attitude,
which, while discouraging the use of alcohol as an
FACTORS OF INDUSTRIAL DRINKING. 129
industrial stimulant, would allow its consumption
after work, and, in a very moderate extent, as a
dinner beverage. Such systems have already been
tried and found satisfactory in practice. Some
years ago, for instance, in the construction of the
Little Don Valley reservoir, the Corporation of Shef-
field, in addition to establishing a restaurant where
good food could be bought at nearly cost price,
provided also a canteen for the sale of beer, but
allowed it to be open only at the dinner-time and
for a couple of hours in the evening. This plan
worked very well, and might be copied with advan-
tage not only in undertakings of this nature, but
also, mutatis mutandis j in the docks and other centres
of unskilled labour.
The facts which we have examined in this and
the preceding chapter have shown us that the
changes that have occurred within recent years in
the conditions of industry in this country have for
the most part tended very decidedly to diminish
industrial drinking. It should, therefore, be of
interest to inquire whether, as ought to be the case
if this optimistic view be correct, there has been any
corresponding fall in the statistical movement of
alcoholism during the same period. At the first
blush this expectation does not seem to be fulfilled.
The average jper capita consumption of beer and
spirits has never decreased to any extent, and of
late years has even shown some tendency to approxi-
mate to the high level of the early seventies;
arrests for drunkenness, again, though they declined
considerably up to 1896, have since that date
9
130 ALCOHOLISM.
increased in number ; while tlie registered mortality
from alcoholic diseases has more than doubled since
1867.
On closer scrutiny, however, the significance of
these figures is considerably modified. In the first
place the statistics of drunkenness and of the con-
sumption of drunk do not really concern us at all;
as we have repeatedly pointed out, more drunken-
ness and a higher jper capita consumption of liquor
are no indications of a true increase in alcoholism ;
they may be merely due to a greater amount of
convivial drinking, such as usually accompanies
'' good times." And in the period under discussion
we know that this was, as a matter of fact, in a large
measure the explanation of their occurrence ; for
in that period the years of their maximum inci-
dence were also years of conspicuous general pros-
perity.
The increase in the mortality from alcoholism
would, if real, be a more serious difficulty ; but, as
has been pointed out by numerous critics, it must
be regarded as in great part merely apparent. This
is evident from the fact that the rise in the number'
of deaths ascribed to chronic alcoholism has co-
incided with an even greater fall in the mortality
from liver diseases, and is, therefore, in all pro-
bability, due to a transfer of deaths from one
category to the other. The following figures will
make this point plain :
FACTORS OF INDUSTRIAL DRINKING. 131
Annual Death-rates from Chronic Alcoholism, and
from Cirrhosis and other Diseases of the Liver, to a
Million living — Averages for Quinquennial Periods
from 1881 to 1900.
1881-1885 1886-1890 1891-1895 1896-1900
Chronic alcoholism 34*8 . 42-8 . 53*0 . 70*6
Liver diseases . 350-6 . 305*6 . 351-6 . 232*8
Moreover, as Dr. Shadwell has shown, daring this
same period the mortality from the least equivocal
and most easily recognised alcoholic disease, namely
delirium tremens, has hardly increased at aU; its
annual average from 188J to 1885 stood at 13*4 per
million living ; between 1886 and 1890 it was 13*2 ;
and during the next two quinquennial periods it
was 15*0.
If, then, due allowance be made for these quali-
fying considerations, it will appear that- the increase
of alcoholism in England in the last thirty years
will be reduced to such moderate proportions that,
in view of the other changes that have occurred in
the same period, and which were eminently of a
kind to promote intemperance, it may be looked on
as equivalent to a relative decrease. For during
these years, in which the exodus from the country
to the towns has been at its height, there has
been a large transfer of labour from the tempe-
rate occupations of husbandry to the urban trades,
where industrial drinking is most rife. The following
table, showing per 10,000 of the total population the
distribution amongst the chief forms of industry in
1901 and in 1881, will illustrate this chauge ;
132 ALCOHOLISM.
Industry. 1901 1881
(1) Agriculture 495 . 711
(2) Building 273 . 239
(3) Mining 202 . 158
(4) Chief textile industries . . 243 . 313
(5) Iron and steel .... 301 . 289
Under these circumstances a very marked rise in
the amount of alcoholism might naturally have been
looked for ; and the fact that, on the contrary, there
has been at most only a very moderate increase
would seem, therefore, to indicate that during this
period there must have been a considerable abate-
ment in industrial drinking. And this, it may be
added by way of confirmation, is also the general
impression of intelligent observers amongst the
workmen themselves.
On the whole, then, we may take it that the
present evolution of industrial conditions in England
is tending to bring about a decided decrease in the
prevalence of alcoholism, most pronounced in the
skilled industries, but evident also in even the lower
sorts of labour. And there is no reason to suppose
that this trend of things is at all likely to change, at
all events in the near future. On the contrary, it
appears more probable that the improvement in the
standard of living amongst the working classes on
the one hand, and, on the other, the increasing
recognition of the need for high industrial efficiency
which results from intenser competition, will tend
more and more to check the use of alcohol as an
industrial stimulant, and will relegate it to its proper
function in convivial life.
INTERCHAPTER.
SOCIAL EFFECTS OF ALCOHOLISM.
Having discussed the phenomena of alcoholic action
in the individual, and having examined in some
detail the industrial conditions that are mainly re-
sponsible for the spread of the chronic intoxication
in the community, it now remains to deal with the
third portion of our task, and to consider the relation
of alcoholism to certain of the graver social evils
in whose causation it is supposed to play an im-
portant part. From this point of view wo shall treat
in the following chapters of suicide, crime, insanity,
and racial degeneration.
As we shall have occasion to remark in discussing
these social problems severally, the different obser-
vers who have studied them have differed a good
deal in their opinions and in their statistical esti-
mates of the importance of the alcoholic influence.
In a large measure, no doubt, this must be attributed
to the extreme complexity of the questions involved,
and to the inadequacy and uncertainty of the data
available for their solution. But it is easy to see
that, over and above these inherent difficulties, there
are others which have helped even more to obscure
134 ALCOHOLISM.
the subject^ but which are of a different character
and are dependent on causes that are largely re-
movable.
Of these avoidable causes of confusion by far the
most important arises from lack of a definite limita-
tion of what we are to understand by the consequences
of alcoholism. Very frequently it is sought to
include amongst these consequences^ not only the
direct results on health and conduct which the
intoxication of the organism produces, but also the
indirect mischief, positive and negative, which drink-
ing habits entail as a form of wasteful expenditure.
This attitude may, no doubt, be quite legitimate when
certain purely political and economic aspects of the
drink question are under consideration, and its prac-
tical utility may then, perhaps, be sufficient to
outweigh the disadvantages that are inseparable
from a method so liable to the distorting influence
of arbitrary judgment. It has, however, no such
raison d'etre in the study of intemperance from any
other point of view; and in an inquiry like this
on which we are here engaged, where it is a chief
aim to secure as much precision as the subject will
admit of, the vagueness it brings into the discussion
would be an unqualified evil.
In our examination, therefore, of the social results
of alcoholism we shall confine ourselves to the phe-
/^ nomena that can be directly connected with the
f ' organic intoxication, and will take no account of the
V dangers which the drink traffic may in other ways
bring upon the community.
This limitation is not, of course, adopted merely
SOCIAL EFFECTS OF ALCOHOLISM.
Oi)
to secure an artificial clearness : it is, on the con-
trary, fully justified on the score of accuracy, for
the facts to which it restricts our survey form a
special category quite distinct from the indirect evils
of intemperance, and claiming an alcoholic origin on
very much stronger grounds. When, for instance,
an individual of previously valid brain becomes
clironically intoxicated, and lapses into alcoholic
dementia, or while in the dream-state of drunken-
ness commits suicide or murder, then the insanity,
the suicide, or the crime will properly be accounted
a direct and immediate consequence of alcoholism, a
result due to tlie intoxication of the organism. But
the relation is entirely diiferent in the case of those
evils which are only indirectly connected with drink-
ing excesses. Thus, if a man squanders his wages
with his boon companions and lets his children go
supperless and barefoot, the suffering and social
evil thereby induced cannot in the same way be
attributed to alcoholism ; they are not the conse-
quences of intoxication ; they are the results of
vicious self-indulgence which happens to have taken
this particular direction, but which, had this path
been closed to it, would readily have found another
where its detrimental eif ects might have been no less
serious. In the strict sense, therefore, these and
other similar indirect evils which result from extra-
vagant spending on drink cannot be included
amongst the proper mischiefs of alcoholism ; they
have no necessary connection with it, no specifically
alcoholic character. It has seemed desirable to
insist on this point at the outset because its neglect
^^-^ 136 ALCOHOLISM.
z *^
nas, to a greater extent than any other cause, en-
hanced the difficulties attendant on the discussion of
these problems, and has led to estimates of the social
gravity of alcoholism which, by their diversity, and
by the obvious exaggeration of some of them, have
done much to prevent the proper apprehension of
the question and to discourage its exact study.
As our chief aim in the ensuing chapters will be
to ascertain how far alcoholism, defined in the
narrower sense we have just indicated, is really
operative as a factor in the causation of the several
social evils we propose to discuss, we must pursue
our inquiry mainly by the help of statistics. Un-
fortunately, even the best evidence of this sort is
apt to be somewhat inconclusive ; and many of the
statistics that we shall have to use are very far
from attaining a high standard of excellence. For
this reason we must approach their consideration in
a somewhat critical spirit, and must recognise that
any estimate of the proportions of the alcoholic
evil based on their indications can have no preten-
sion to more than a very approximate degree of
accuracy; on many points, indeed, we shall find
that they fail even to carry us so far, and that we
must be content to remain for the present in a state
of indecision.
CHAPTER VIII.
ALCOHOLISM AND SUICIDE.
In the chapter on chronic alcoholism it was pointed
out that the suicidal impulse is the most frequent
and most characteristic of the graver disorders of
conduct to which the habitual drunkard is prone. It
will, therefore, be anticipated that, when we come to
deal with alcoholism from the point of view of its
influence on social phenomena, we shall find that in-
fluence most pronounced in the case of suicide. And
this expectation is, in fact, in a large measure
realised. Of course, as with all phenomena of this
order, suicide has no fixed and invariable formula :
the absolute and relative importance of alcoholism
in its causation will differ widely in different countries
and in the same country in different places and at
different times. It is, accordingly, only where alco-
holism is exceptionally prevalent, or where the other
causes of suicide are comparatively inoperative, that
we can expect the movement of suicide to show un-
equivocal evidence of alcoholic influence. Thus,
Denmark, and, before the adoption of the Gotlien-
burg system, Scandinavia, may be pointed out as
realising the former condition ; while Ireland, as wo
138 ALCOHOLISM.
shall see later on, is a typical instance of a commu-
nity where the relative insignificance of ordinary
suicide gives a magnified importance to the alcoholic
variety.
In this country, on the other hand, the conditions
are different ; the absolute amount of alcoholism,
though considerable, is very much less than in Den-
mark ; while the other causes of suicide, which are
lacking or are of small account in Ireland, are present
here in a marked degree.
But though for this reason the influence of alco-
holism does not in England attain to such prominence
that it is immediately and plainly to be recognised
in the statistical movement of suicide, we may,
nevertheless, by indirect methods arrive at a fairly
clear notion of its nature and importance.
To do this, we have first to ascertain what are the
distinctive characters by which the alcoholic influence
in suicide is revealed in statistics. The data for this
inquiry are derived from several sources. In the
first place the occupational death-rates as given in
the Registrar-Generars returns show us a number of
industrial groups— those more particularly connected
with the liquor trade — in which a very high rate of
alcoholism is associated with a corresponding fre-
quency of suicide. Since there is no evidence of
any extraordinary operation in these groups of other
causes of suicide, we may probably take it that the
suicide is here a result of the alcoholism, and that,
so far as it shows any unusual features, these are
likely to be due to this special origin.
In the same way we can utilise another source of
ALCOHOLISM AND SUICIDE. 139
information to wliich we have already had occasion
to refer, viz. the police returns of attempts to com-
mit suicide. Such attempts, which in this country-
are indictable offences, and are therefore reported by
the police with enough care and uniformity to give
them a good deal of statistical value, are found on
direct investigation, as we pointed out in Chapter IV,
to be due in about 80 per cent, of the cases to chronic
alcoholism ; and we shall presently see that tlie
characters which appear in their statistical analysis
give further proof in support of this view of their
origin. These attempts, then, like suicides in the
industrial groups most prone to intemperance, may
be taken to represent alcoholic suicide, and the
characters in which they agree with the suicides in
these groups and differ from the general run of
suicides will presumably be those distinctive of their
alcoholic causation.
Of the distinguishing characteristics found in this
manner, the most important and the most evident is
that of earlier age incidence. Ordinarily the ten-
dency to suicide increases with advancing years :
slight in the time of active vitality, it becomes more
marked w^th each successive decade, reaching its
maximum over sixty-five years of age (vide infra,
page 140). On the other hand, in the suicides of the
alcoholic groups and in attempts to commit suicide
we find that the relation to age is quite different.
From the tables of the Registrar-General wo may
select the following groups which show a special
alcoholic proclivity : publicans, butchers, coach and
cab drivers, commercial travellers, hairdressers, and
140 ALCOHOLISM.
musicians. In the tliree years 1890—1892 there
were in these groups in all 404 cases of suicide by
males over twenty-five years of age. If the suicide
rates per million living at each age period in this
composite alcoholic class be now compared with the
corresponding figures for all occupied males, we get
the following results :
25- 35- 45- 55- 65-
Occupied males . 137-1 . 214-2 . 307-6 . 421-8 . 553-1
Alcoholics . . 249-5 . 404-0 . 405-3 . 622-1 . 8696
The meaning of the figures will be better seen
if we translate them into terms of a single standard.
In the following table this is done : the suicide rates
per million living in each age period of the com-
posite alcoholic group, of publicans taken as a
purely alcoholic class, and of agriculturists taken as
a typically non-alcoholic class, are shown in per-
centage relation to the corresponding rates for
occupied males :
25-
35-
45-
55-
65-
Occupied males
. 100
. 100
. 100
, 100
, 100
Alcoholics
. 181-9 .
, 188-6 .
, 131-7
. 147-4 ,
, 157-2
Publicans
. 260-3
. 246-8
. 166-9 ,
. 156-2 "
. 100-9
Agriculturists
. 64-2
. 68-8 ,
70-6 .
. 78-1 ,
86-6
In this table, comparing the two groups preceding
with the two following the age of forty-five, we
observe that it is in the former that the alcoholic
influence is chiefly perceptible. In the composite
alcoholic group the excess over the average suicide
rate rises to more than 80 per cent, in the earlier
groups, to only 37 per cent, and 47 per cent, in the
two later groups. And the contrast is still more
ALCOHOLISM AND SUICIDE. 141
vividly apparent when it is made between tlio
opposed groups of publicans and agriculturists. Li
the earlier age periods the deviation from the
standard is at its maximum ; in the decade twenty-
five to thirty-five in the class where alcoholic influ-
ence is least active the suicide rate is more than
30 per cent, below the average, in the class where
that influence is most potent it is more than 150
per cent, above the average. In each successive
age group this influence is less perceptible, and in
the last group — above the age of sixty-five — the
suicide rate in agriculturists is only 14 per cent,
below the average, while that of publicans falls to a
figure practically identical with the standard.
This is not a merely casual feature of the last
census figures. The same result is obtained if we
examine earlier statistics. For instance, in a paper
read by Dr. Ogle before the Statistical Society,
figures are given showing details of the age inci-
dence of suicide in various occupations during the
six years 1878—1883. Calculating from his figures, we
find that compared with the total male suicide rate
taken as 100, the suicide rate amongst publicans
amounted to 271*6 in the vicennial age period
twenty-five to forty-five, while falling to 168-5 per
cent, in the period forty-five to sixty-five.
The examination of the figures regarding suicidal
attempts gives a similar result. Unluckily in the
criminal statistics, which deal with these attempts,
and in the returns of the Registrar-General, which
are our authority for actual suicides, age groups are
classified on difl:'erent systems, and it is, consequently.
142 ALCOHOLISM.
impossible iu place the figures in exact parallelism.
The two phenomena present^ however, a contrast so
marked that it appears with perfect plainness in
spite of this difficulty. Thus in the mortality returns
of adult males it is found that the proportion of
suicides by persons aged over forty-five years is
55*6 per cent., the period of maximum incidence
being the decade 45—55. On the other hand,
amongst adult males tried at Assizes and Quarter
Sessions for attempting to commit suicide (1893—1897),
the proportion aged over forty was only 46'7, and
the period of maximum incidence was the decade
30—40. A similar contrast is .found as regards
females : the maximum incidence in suicides in that
sex is in the decade 35—45, while in attempts to
commit suicide it is in the period 21—30. These
two expressions, therefore, of the suicidal impulse of
alcoholism — suicides in the alcoholic group, and
attempts to commit suicide — agree in this character
of earlier age incidence.
As regards the influences of sex and of season,
which next to the influence of age have the most
potent effect on the movement of suicide, we have
less evidence, but what there is suggests that but
little difference is to be traced in these respects
between alcoholic suicide and suicide from other
causes. And that is, of course, very much what we
should expect to find, for both these influences
operate somewhat similarly on alcoholism and on
suicide. Thus women are less exposed to the
ordinary causes of suicide than are men, and their
contribution to suicide in all countries is consider-
ALCOHOLISM AND SUICIDE. 143
ably smaller than that of the other sex ; in England
it averages about 25 per cent, of the whole. But
they are also much less prone to alcoholism : the
judicial estimate of female drunkenness puts it at
29 per cent, of the total ; and the mortality of
women from alcoholism and cirrhosis of the liver is
to that of men in the proportion of less than two to
three. We should accordingly anticipate also a
lesser frequency of alcoholic suicide in women : and
this is what we find, so far at least as we can judge
from the very inadequate evidence which is alone
available — the statistics of persons indicted at Assizes
and Quarter Sessions for attempting to commit
suicide. In the period 1893-97 the proportion of
women amongst persons so indicted amounted to
27 per cent.
In respect of seasonal influence, again, we find a
similar harmony between actual suicide and suicidal
attempts ; both increase regularly from winter to
summer, and decrease from summer to winter. Of
course, we can hardly speak of a seasonal influence
as affecting the development of a condition of chronic
alcoholism, though even in that sense, no doubt, the
seasonal variations in the length of the working day
must react on the amount of industrial drinking.
But apart from that aspect of the question, it is
natural to suppose that the predisposition created
by chronic intoxication will not affect the liability to
the ordinary organic influences (such as that of
season is, at least in part) which work on the suicidal
tendency. And, moreover, we know that in any case
drunkenness, which is so frequently the immediate
Of THE
UNfVEftSITY
OF
144 ALCOHOLISM.
factor in the suicide of the chronic alcoholic, rises
and falls with the same seasonal curve as suicide.
There is, therefore, no reason why, in respect of
seasonal incidence or of sexual proclivity, there
should be any marked divergence between alcoholic
and ordinary suicide.
More characteristic differences appear when we
come to deal with another factor which has much
influence in ordinary suicide, namely the form of
religious belief. We cannot investigate this factor
directly, owing to the absence of information on the
matter in English statistics ; but we can attempt an
indirect comparison by observing the facts in Ireland,
where the religious conditions are different, while
the amount of alcoholism is very little less than in
this country. Without going into details, we may
summarise the facts by stating that while in Ireland,
as in most predominantly Catholic countries, the
rate of actual suicide is very low, that of suicidal
attempts is relatively high, and in recent years has
often been considerably in excess of the rate of actual
suicide. In 1898, for instance, and in 1899, when
the number of actual suicides amounted to 145 and
128 respectively, the number of cases of suicidal
attempts were 171 and 179. And this excessive
frequency of suicidal attempts has been comparatively
much more decided in the Catholic provinces than
in Ulster. These facts, therefore, would suggest
that if, as seems probable, the low suicide rate of
Ireland be mainly due to the influence of Catholicism,
that influence is, relatively, powerless against the
suicidal impulse of alcoholism.
ALCOHOLISM AND SUICIDE. 145
Another probable point of distinction between or-
dinary and alcoholic suicide is in respect of the
methods of self-destruction. Since the impulsive
suicide of the drunkard is, as we have seen, generally
characterised by obscuration of consciousness and
absence of deliberation, we should expect a 'priori
that it would be realised more often by such simple
methods as drowning or poison rather than by the
more elaborate way of hanging. Unfortunately, we
have very little evidence by which we can attempt
to test this deduction : no information with regard
to methods is available in the statistics of suicidal
attempts or of suicides in the alcoholic groups.
There are, however, some indirect and imperfect in-
dications to be made out, and these go to support
the view to which we have referred. Thus in a
series of personal observations of attempted suicide,
too few, however (only 143 in number), to carry
much weight, there was noted a marked predominance
of drowning and poison (57'3 percent.) overhanging
(7*6 per cent.). This is, of course, a reversal of the
conditions found in ordinary suicide, where hanging
is the method chiefly resorted to. Again, in those
parts of Ireland where, owing to the religious con-
ditions, the alcoholic influence in suicide has a higher
relative importance, we find a similar tendency to a
lesser frequency of hanging. For instance, in the
four years 1887-90, while the proportion of suicides
by hanging in Ulster amounted to 32-1 per cent, of
all suicides in that province, in the Catholic provinces
the proportion was only 23 per cent. It is interesting
to observe, further, in connection with this matter,
10
146 ALCOHOLISM.
that as a general rule, which is most clearly to be
seen in countries where alcoholism is very prevalent,
the preference for other methods of suicide than
hanging is most marked in the earlier age-groups,
in which, as we have already pointed out, the
alcoholic influence is strongest. Thus Wagner has
shown in the Danish statistics that, while the pro-
portion of suicides by hanging increases steadily
from the earlier to the later age-groups, the reverse
obtains for suicide by drowning and by poison. And
a somewhat similar relation can be traced in English
suicides; in the years 1890, 1891, for instance, amongst
male suicides in this country the proportion at ages
under forty-five was, in suicides by hanging 33 '5 per
cent., in suicides by drowning 47*5 per cent., and in
suicides by poison 50 per cent. These statistical
data are evidently far too imperfect to warrant any
definite conclusion, but they are at all events fully
consistent with the tt priori probability that in alco-
holic suicide there is a tendency to the choice of
drowning or poison rather than to the choice of
hanging.
To sum up, therefore, the foregoing discussion,
we are to conclude that the distinctive characters of
the suicide of alcoholism are a tendency to earlier
age-incidence, an independence of religious influ-
ences, and a predominance of the cruder and more
impulsive methods of execution.
To these characters we must add, to complete its
description, that this type of suicide is connected
essentially with the chronic intoxication, and not at
all with primary drunkenness. This was the con-
ALCOHOLISM AND SUICIDE. 147
elusion to which, our study of alcoholism in the
individual led us, and we have seen that it is fully
borne out by the statistical evidence. Thus it
is clear from the figures given on pp. 66, 67, that,
while the distribution of suicidal attempts, which we
know to be of predominantly alcoholic origin, cor-
responds pretty well with that of the mortality from
alcoholic diseases, it is entirely uninfluenced by the
local prevalence of drunkenness. And a similar
result was found on comparing the incidence of the
phenomena in the composite groups (pp. 72, 73).
Alcoholism is pretty prevalent in this country ;
and we have seen some reason to affirm that the
suicidal impulse is one of its most ordinary mani-
festations ; and, though no doubt in the largo
majority of instances the impulse leads only to an
abortive attempt, there must nevertheless be a con-
siderable number of actual suicides from this cause.
It is, therefore, natural to suppose that alcoholism
accounts for an appreciable part of the total amount
of suicide in England. The majority of writers who
have expressed themselves on the point have adopted
for this country the estimates of Lunier for France
and of Brierre de Boismont for Paris, and have set
down one suicide in eight as due to intemperance.
Though estimates of the amount of alcoholic influ-
ence are, as a rule, much more apt to err on the
side of excess than of deficiency, it is probable that
this figure is to be taken as a minimum. It would
be much less than half that arrived at by comparing
the suicide rate amongst occupied males as a class
with the rate in the very large occupational groups
148
ALCOHOLISM.
in which alcoholic influence is at its lowest — namely
in coal-miners and agriculturists. In these typically
non-alcoholic groups the comparative mortality
figures for suicide are respectively nine and ten,
while the corresponding figure amongst occupied
males in general is fourteen. If we take the excess
of the latter figure over the former to represent
very roughly the share that alcoholism has in the
Suicide in the Counties of England and in North and
South Wales. Annual Average per 100,000 of Esti-
mated Population during the Period 1891—1895.
Northampton
12-09
Norfolk .
8-54
Suffolk .
11-50
Hampshire
8-40
Sussex
11-24
Worcester .
8-38
Nottingham
10-68
Oxford
8-37
Leicester .
10-56
Cambridge
8-29
Metropolis .
10-50
Stafford .
8-17
Lincoln
10-21
Bedford .
8-10
Huntingdon
10-16
Berkshire .
7-96
Warwick .
10-07
Cheshire .
7-96
Westmoreland
9-99
Cumberland
. 7-80
Northumberland
9-92
Rutland
7-74
Shropshire
9-48
Gloucester .
7-65
Devon
9-46
Hereford .
7-42
Lancashire
. 9-10
Durham .
7-15
Dorset
. 8-84
Monmouth
6-28
Somerset .
. 8-71
Wiltshire .
5-51
Derby
8-68
South Wales
5-43
Buckingham
8-64
Cornwall .
4-90
York
. 8-59
North Wales
4-63
ALCOHOLISM AND SUICIDE. 149
suicide of all occupied males between the ages of
fifteen and sixty -five, we should then rate it at from
28 to 35 per cent. Of course, even if this method
were reliable, the figure for the whole population
would be distinctly lower, since alcoholic influence
is of less significance in women, and at ages above
the limits adopted for the statistics of occupied
males. Under any circumstances, however, it is
probable that intemperance is responsible for a
larger proportion of suicides than is attributed to it
in the estimates we have quoted, and that we should
be well within the mark if we put its contribution
at about 20 per cent.
Since the regional distribution of alcoholism varies
within pretty wide limits, we should naturally expect
that its influence on suicide, if it be really so con-
siderable as we have suggested, should be in some
measure perceptible in the local incidence of the
latter phenomenon. And it is, in fact, apparent,
though not perhaps very clearly, in the following
table, which shows the frequency of suicide in the
several counties of England and in North and
South Wales during the years 1891-1895. On
comparing this table with the figures on pp. 66, 67,
giving the distribution of alcoholic mortality and of
attempted suicide during the decennial period 1891-
1900, it will be noted that though the corre-
spondence of the phenomena is very imperfect,
nevertheless there is a general tendency for the
counties high in the scale of alcoholism to show
also fairly high rates of suicide ; and that in no
instance, at all events amongst the larger counties.
150
ALCOHOLISM.
do we find a considerable prevalence of alcoholism
with a low rate of suicide. And we observe
further that the incidence of suicide shows no cor-
respondence whatever with the frequency of drun-
kenness, being relatively low, for example, in such
drunken districts as Durham and South Wales.
The last point to which we have to refer is the
present tendency in alcoholic suicide. Of recent
years the frequency of suicide in England has in-
creased ; the rate per million inhabitants, which in
the decennium 1861— 1870 stood at 65, rose in the fol-
lowing decade to 70, and in the decade 1881—1890
reached 77, representing an increase of over 18 per
cent, on the figures for the first-named period. Now,
this increase in suicide has been characterised by
two peculiarities. In the first place it has affected
the earlier age groups very much more than the
later. This is evident from the following table,
showing the distribution of the increase in the four
age groups comprised within the limits of twenty-
Increase of
Suicide Bate per
Million Inhabitants
living in each Age Group from 1861—1870 to 1881-
1890.
Age.
Increase.
Males
. 25—35
24*7 per cent.
35—45
20-3 „
45—55
17-5 „
55—65
15-9 „
Females .
. 20—25
25-8 „
25—35
20-0 „
35—45
. 24-5 „
45 55
1-2 ,,
ALCOHOLISM AND SUICIDE. 151
five and sixty-five years in men, and twenty and
fifty-five years in women. It is within this period
of life that the large majority — considerably more
than three fourths — of suicides occur, and therefore
the variations in these groups are decisive of the
general tendency in the statistical movement.
The second remarkable feature in the growth of
suicide is that it has been practically limited to
suicide by drowning and by poison, while suicide by
hanging has remained about stationary.
But these two features, of earlier age incidence
and of more impulsive method, are, as we have seen
above, precisely those which are found in alcoholic
suicide. And it will be further borne in mind
that during the period with which we are concerned
there has also been a very remarkable rise in the
frequency of suicidal attempts, which we must
mainly attribute to alcoholism.
Thus in the period 1867-1871 the number of cases
of attempted suicide amounted to 35'5 per million
inhabitants ; in each succeeding quinquennial period
it stood higher, and in the period of 1892-1896 it
rose to 57*9 per million, an increase of over 78
per cent, on the first cited figures.
These two facts, then, taken together, would
suggest that in the recent growth of suicide an im-
portant part has been played by an increased alcoholic
influence. It is said advisedly " an increased alco-
holic influence '' rather than an increase of alcoholism;
for though, as we have seen, there has been in these
years a slight rise in the per capita consumption of
intoxicants, and a real, though probably slight, rise
152 ALCOHOLISM.
also in alcoholic mortality, it is not likely that such
increase of alcoholism as is indicated thereby would
be at all sufficient to account for so decided an
effect on the movement of suicide. It is more pro-
bable that the conduct of the alcoholic, like that of
the criminal and the lunatic, has not entirely escaped
modification by the general social tendencies of the
time, and that there has been, so to speak, a change
of direction in the alcoholic impulsiveness, so that
tendencies to suicide have developed at the expense
of tendencies to violence.
CHAPTER IX.
ALCOHOLISM AND CRIME.
The discussion of the influence of alcoholism on
crime is attended with rather more difficulty than
was met with in the corresponding inquiry regard-
ing suicide; and it has led, accordingly, to even
more widely discordant estimates of the nature and
importance of the part that intemperance plays in
the causation of delinquency.
The main source of this confusion, however,
would appear to lie less in the inherent difficulties of
the question than in the frequent use of the term
" crime " as if it corresponded to some distinct and
relatively simple mode of conduct, instead of being,
as it is, a word of purely legal meaning, embracing a
heterogeneous collection of acts which have no
common character save that of illegality. This
fallacy, which runs through a good many plausible
generalisations about crime and criminals, is par-
ticularly misleading in connection with alcoholism.
On the one hand, owing to the inclusion under the
rubric of crime of the various infringements of tlie
liquor laws, it overstates the amount of the alcoholic
contribution to the total volume of criminality;
154 ALCOHOLISM.
while on the other hand, by leaving out of account
the differences in social gravity between the several
varieties of more serious delinquency, it tends to
an error in the opposite direction, obscuring the fact
that the classes of real crime in which the alcoholic
influence is most potent, though numerically insig-
nificant, are precisely those of most importance to
society.
^^JThe eXjaggerations to which this fallacy may lead
in the first direction are obvious when it is recalled
that of the total violations of the law, of all sorts and
degrees, in this country, more than a quarter are
cases of simple drunkenness. And if we add to
these the other infringements of the licensing laws,
and the trivial cases of assault and damage, which
are merely drunkenness under another name, this
proportion will be raised to considerably over one
third. ' Naturally, therefore, when we reckon all
offences indiscriminately under the heading of crime,
and inquire into their origin, we find that drunken-
ness appears to play the predominant part in the
causation of criminality. And it may be added
that it is largely on this fallacy that the defence of
the legal attitude towards drunkenness is grounded ;
that is to say, drunkenness is penalised mainly be-
cause it is regarded as a serious cause of crime,
and at the same time it is proved to be so by sta-
tistics in which in reality it constitutes the chief
part of the crime it is supposed to cause.
If in this way the influence of alcoholism on crimi-
nality is over-estimated, it is liable to be as much
falsified in the contrary direction in statistics which
ALCOHOLISM AND CRIME. 155
ignore petty delinquency, and deal only with indict-
able offences. For, as we shall see later on, the
crimes that are in an important measure due to alco-
holism are especially crimes of violence and crimes
of lust, while it has relatively little to do with the
causation of crimes of acquisitiveness, which latter
make up more than 90 per cent, of indictable offences
in England. By pursuing our inquiry on this basis,
accordingly, we should arrive at the result that alco-
holism was probably responsible for much less than
10 per cent, of serious crime — an estimate which, in
that form, is only of value to those who would attri-
bute the same significance to larceny and to murder.
To meet these difficulties, then, what we have to
do is to consider, not the relation of alcoholism to a
vague abstraction which we entitle " crime," but its
relation to each individual category of crime. In
this way our estimates will be at all events more in-
telligible ; and, so far as they are based on the
observation of the general statistical movement of
the phenomena concerned, they should bo fairly
reliable. When, however, they depend in any meas-
ure on the direct appreciation of the alcoholic factor
in any group of criminals their value will bo further
qualified by reason of the extreme complexity of
causation in even the seemingly most simple modes
of delinquency. Such complexity, as it demands of
the observer a corresponding degree of care in
psychological analysis, makes his personal equation
a disturbing factor of proportionate importance. It
is for this reason, chiefly, that the majority of detailed
prison statistics regarding the alcoholic influence in
156 ALCOHOLISM.
crime are only to be accepted with considerable re-
serve. The wide differences in these estimates, which
cannot be accounted for by variations in other con-
ditions, and their contradiction by independent
evidence, show sufficiently that in most instances the
probable error from lack of good faith and intelligence
on the part of the criminal has not been checked by
the critical judgment of the observer. And in the
case of alcoholism the need of such a check is doubly
great. No plea for moral shortcomings is more
readily raised and more lightly accepted than that of
intemperance ; where an alibi of the body cannot be
set up, drunkenness is an easy alibi of the mind.
Hence in such statistics generally, and more especially
in those compiled by clergymen of all denominations,
who are commonly better judges of the abstract
moral quality of conduct than of its causation, the
influence of alcoholism is likely to be overrated.
When, for instance, we observe that of male prisoners
convicted of crimes of acquisitiveness in Sweden
52*2 per cent, were drunk at the time of the offence,
but that the proportion st) found in France is only
3'2 per cent., we shall probably be safe in assuming
that this difference depends less on the diversity of
conditions in the two countries than on the fact that
the former estimate is furnished by prison chaplains
from the statements of prisoners, while the more
modest figures are based on the dossiers of the com-
mitting courts. And similarly, when one of the most
recent inquiries on this point — that conducted by the
American Committee of Fifty — makes intemperance
a cause in 49'5 per cent, of crimes of acquisitiveness.
ALCOHOLISM AND CRIME. 157
we are hardly surprised to learn that the intemper-
ance which is supposed to be the causal influence is
sometimes nothing more direct than the " intemper-
ance of associates."
On the whole, therefore, we shall probably find it
more profitable, instead of relying on statistics of
this sort, to try to form an independent view of the
matter from the facts and figures available with
reference to this country.
At the outset we may assume that the offences
which may be described as skilled crime are not, as
a rule, found in frequent association with alcoholism :
the expert burglar or the artistic forger may cele-
brate a professional success by a carouse, but the
exigencies of their work would obviously make it
impossible for them to be habitual drinkers. On the
other hand, in the unskilled forms of illegality —
crimes of violence, crimes against morals, petty lar-
ceny, vagrancy, prostitution, and so forth — a large
proportion of offenders are alcoholic. In such cases
the crime is sometimes the direct result of the intoxica-
tion ; in other instances alcoholism and crime are
co-effects of some common cause or causes in the
individual or in his enviro'^Tnect •, or again, the
special circumstances of the criminal milieu may
lead to alcoholism.
Now, as we saw in discussing alcoholism in the
individual, simple drunkenness may promote impulses
of acquisitiveness and normal sexual impulses ; while
chronic intoxication creates a proneness to suicidal
and homicidal impulses, and to certain sexual im-
pulses of an aberrant sort. It is evidently possible.
158 ALCOHOLISM.
therefore, that in the several corresponding varieties
of crime alcoholism may be a more or less important
factor. How far it is so in reality, and how it
compares in relative importance with their other
causes, we may try to ascertain, on the one hand, by
an examination of the general statistics of alcoholism
and of delinquency, and, on the other hand, by the
direct study of representatives of the several classes
of criminals.
To take the former method first, we have to inquire
what has been in recent years the direction of the
statistical movement in alcoholism, and to compare
it with that of crime during the same period. As
we have already seen, there has been within the last
quarter of a century but little change in the amount
of alcoholism ; the fer capita consumption of liquor
has kept at a fairly high level, though it has not
come up to the big figures of the early seventies ;
the mortality from alcoholic diseases has probably
risen, but only in a very slight degree ; and the rate
of drunkenness, though oscillating widely in indi-
vidual years, has shown no decided and persistent
change of tendency.
Now, during thi^ ^rae period in which the amount
of alcoholism has been thus practically unaltered, or
has, at all events, not decreased, there has been, on
the other hand, a very considerable change in the
amount of crime. Of the three varieties of delin-
quency which are obviously the most important, we
find that crimes of acquisitiveness have very largely
decreased ; crimes of violence have also diminished,
though to a rather less extent; while crimes of lust
ALCOHOLISM AND CRIME. 159
have continued at about the same level, if they have
not shown some tendency to rise in frequency. Thus
the proportion per 100,000 of population of offences
of acquisitiveness reported to the police, which in
the five years 1875-1879 averaged 337-12, and which
was somewhat higher in the next quinquennial period,
has since then fallen steadily, and in the years
1895-1899 stood at 234-38— a decrease of over 30 per
cent, on the figures for the first period. Similarly
the proportion of crimes of violence has fallen from
8-73 in 1875-1879 to 6*77 in 1895-1899, being a de-
crease of over 22 per cent. And, as has been proved in
detail in Sir John MacdonnelFs remarkable Introduc-
tion to the Criminal Statistics of 1899, this decrease
can be traced in all the manifestations of aggressive-
ness, in actual and attempted homicide, and in
assaults. With regard to crimes of lust, the statistics
are less reliable owing to the disturbing influence of
the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which
created new offences, and which was moreover both
a cause and an effect of increased vigilance in dealing
with this form of delinquency. If we consider, how-
over, only the time subsequent to that date, we find
that the average proportion of such crimes during
the five years 1895-1899 reached 5-47 per 100,000 of
population, while in the period 1890-1894 it was 5*71,
and in 1885-1889 it was 5-26. The number of cases
of rape and indecent assault which were not directly
influenced by the Act of 1885 has shown an upward
tendency since 1870.
So far, then, as evidence of this sort can take us,
the coincidence of a practically unaltered prevalence
160 ALCOHOLISM.
of alcoholism with a decrease in crimes of acquisitive-
ness and crimes of violence would not support the
view that intemperance is an important cause of such
offences ; while, on the other hand, its coincidence
with an increased or unchanged frequency of crimes
of lust would be consistent with its having a consider-
able influence in the production of this form of
delinquency.
As regards crimes of acquisitiveness, in which the
diminution has been very pronounced, this inference
is probably correct ; we know from other sources of
information, from the direct observation of the
criminals, from the relation of • such offences to
economic conditions, from their seasonal incidence,
and so forth, that the bulk of crimes of acquisitive-
ness are not connected with alcoholism ; nor, indeed,
has the contrary opinion ever been seriously main-
tained.
With crimes of violence, however, the case is very
different. Such offences are universally held to be
in a large measure due to drink, and all the direct
evidence on the point goes to support this view of
the matter. It is, therefore, somewhat surprising to
find that they have tended to decrease in frequency
despite the continuance of a high rate of alcoholism.
On closer scrutiny, however, it will be seen that this
difficulty becomes much less formidable. In the first
place, we have to note that the falling off in these
offences is considerably less than in crimes of acqui-
sitiveness ; and further, that as a certain proportion
of them are admittedly connected with causes other
than alcoholism, their decrease may be partly due to
ALCOHOLISM AND CRIME. 161
an abatement of some of these causes rather than
to a diminution of the influence of intemperance.
In much larger part, however, the explanation of
this lessened frequency of homicidal offences may
probably be sought, as we have already pointed out
in connection with alcoholic suicide, in the general
trend of manners towards conduct of a less rude and
aggressive type. We can see this influence in non-
alcoholic crime, where fraud has been very largely
substituted for violence, and in insanity, where the
stormy and furious symptoms of lunacy are far rarer
than of old, and where states of depression and of
relatively placid and colourless enfeeblement have
become the more ordinary forms of disease. The
same tendency, if it affected the impulses of the
alcoholic, would obviously be apt to bring about
precisely such a diminution of crimes of violence as
we have noted. And that this is the correct inter-
pretation of' the facts is rendered more probable by
the simultaneous and nearly compensatory increase
in suicidal impulses of alcoholic origin. On the
whole, then, we may conclude that the occurrence of
a decrease in homicide without any corresponding
fall in the amount of alcoholism may be quite con-
ceivably accounted for on the hypothesis of a change
in the direction of the alcoholic impulsiveness, and
that it is not, therefore, necessarily in contradiction
with the geneial opinion which attributes to intem-
perance the chief share in the production of crimes
of violence.
And this view is further supported by the next
class of evidence that we have to discuss, namely
11
162 ALCOHOLISM.
that obtained from the direct examination of the
criminal. Evidence of this sort, as we have already
pointed out, is only of value in so far as it has been
acquired through a fairly exhaustive investigation of
each individual case. For this reason the material
that can be dealt with by any single observer is
necessarily rather limited, and the inferences there-
from will accordingly need to be controlled by com-
parison with the results of many others. Until,
however, a somewhat larger number of observations
of this sort have been recorded than are yet avail-
able, it seems better to defer this task of comparison;
and, therefore, the following figures, which have been
ascertained by personal inquiry, will be presented
independently, it being merely noted that their
general indications do not differ in any essential
points from those of the more reliable amongst the
published statistics of the same nature.
We shall first deal with crimes of violence, the
material under this head comprising two series of
observations, a smaller group made up of 200 male
offenders convicted of murder or of grave homicidal
attempts, and a larger group of 500 cases of less
serious character, chiefly aggravated assaults, tried
before the courts of summary jurisdiction. The cases
in the first series were observed for the most part in
a convict prison, and came from different parts of the
country ; the minor offenders belonged wholly to the
Metropolis.
In the class of graver homicidal offences the
number of cases in which the criminals were of
alcoholic habits amounted to 158, and in 120 of
ALCOHOLISM AND CRIME. 163
these, or 60 per cent, of the whole series, the
criminal act was directly due to alcoholism. In the
other thirty-eight instances no such relationship could
be established, the homicidal offence having been com-
mitted in the course of other criminal enterprises, or
by individuals habitually engaged in crime, or under
circumstances that suggested the influence of ordinary
criminal motives. In the strictly alcoholic cases the
offence was almost invariably found to be related to
an intoxication which had reached a certain degree of
chronicity, less in the hereditarily unstable, greater
in those of primarily valid brain. In a few instances
where no definite symptoms of such chronicity of
poisoning could be ascertained, and where the alco-
holic influence amounted to little more than casual
drunkenness, there was other evidence conclusively
showing the presence of one or more of the other
conditions predisposing to pathological intoxication.
For reasons similar to those adduced in discussing
suicidal attempts, we might anticipate that the alco-
holic influence would be less evident in actual homicide
and in the graver homicidal attempts than in minor
crimes of violence, and that, therefore, statistics
referring to the latter class of cases would show a
higher ratio of alcoholic causation. And this infer-
ence is borne out by the investigation of our larger
series of police-court offenders, which shows the
proportion of cases directly due to intemperance to
amount to 82 per cent. It is to be noted, however,
that in minor offences of this class the proportion
related to simple drunkenness is much less insignifi-
cant than it appears to be in the graver homicidal
164 ALCOHOLISM.
crimes. Thus in the above series of cases of assault
only 67 per cent, showed signs of chronic intoxica-
tion ; in the other 15 per cent, the alcoholic influence
was limited to occasional drinking bouts with intervals
of sobriety. This difference between the two grades
of offences in regard to their relation to drunkenness
is presumably due, in the main, to the fact that in
the graver crimes a primary homicidal impulse is
more generally involved, and this simple drunkenness
is, of itself, incapable of generating; while less
serious acts of aggression will more often owe their
origin in some part to the influence of intercurrent
impressions, which are enabled to produce an
exaggerated reaction by reason of the favouring
conditions of the temporary intoxication.
To put the matter shortly, then, what these prison
/ statistics indicate is, that 60 per cent, of graver
homicidal offences and 82 per cent, of assaults are
1 attributable to alcohol, and that in nearly all the
1 cases of the former class and in four fifths of the
minor offences the intoxication had attained a fair
degree of chronicity.
So much for alcoholism amongst homicidal crimi-
nals. We have now to deal with its influence on sexual
offences, the other category of grave delinquency in
whose causation we have seen reason to think that it
may play an important part. The material which
we have at our disposal in considering this point is,
unfortunately, very much smaller, and the inferences
that we may draw from its examination are only,
therefore, of the most provisional nature. It con-
sists of seventy-five observations of sexual offences,
ALCOHOLISM AND CRIME. 165
comprising twenty-one cases of unnatural crime and
fifty-four cases of rape. Briefly stated, the result of
the investigation of these cases is to suggest that
intemperance has no appreciable influence on un-
natural crime ; that it is a cause of rape in about
half the cases ; and that there is a marked difference
between rape on adults and violation of children in
regard to their alcoholic causation, the former
offence being usually related to simple drunkenness,
while the defilement of children is much more fre-
quently a crime of the chronic alcoholic. So far,
therefore, as these very scanty figures go, their in-
dications are in agreement with what was stated on
this point in the chapters on " Drunkenness " and
" Chronic Alcoholism."
To test the soundness of these conclusions we
have now to recur to the general statistics of alco-
holism and crime. This time we shall consider them
from a different point of view, our object being to
ascertain from their examination whether there is such
a correspondence between the various categories of
crime on the one hand and alcoholic mortality and
drunkenness on the other hand as would accord
with the estimates we have arrived at of the amount
and nature of the alcoholic influence. That is to
say, does the frequency of crimes of violence vary
with that of chronic alcoholism as much as we should
expect on the assumption that the latter condition is
the cause of some 60 per cent, of homicidal offencen?
And further, does it show a relative independence
of the frequency of simple drunkenness ? And
ao-ain— though here we neither have such positive
166 ALCOHOLISM.
views to put to the proof nor can look for such
clear indications from our statistical tests — do we
find that the distribution of sexual crime is con-
sistent with the supposition that any considerable
proportion of it is due to intemperance ?
With regard to homicidal offences, the figures
given in Chapter Y have already answered our ques-
tion. They show that such offences are rarest in
the sober agricultural districts, and most common in
the alcoholic seaports ; and, further, that, on the
whole, their correspondence is with chronic alco-
holism rather than with simple drunkenness, inas-
much as their frequency in the seaports is immensely
in excess of that in the mining districts, where the
rate of drunkenness is actually higher, but where there
is very little chronic alcoholism. It is true that in
the comparison of the manufacturing towns and the
mining districts this correspondence is lost, the pre-
valence of the graver homicidal offences being a
little greater in the mining districts despite their
much lower rate of alcoholism. To some extent
this discordance may possibly be due to variations
in the other causes of homicide, to which we have
supposed as much as 40 per cent, .of that class of
crime may be attributed. This explanation would
be supported by the fact that in the case of assaults,
in which a rather larger proportion are due to in-
temperance, the correspondence reappears, the manu-
facturing towns showing a considerable excess over
the mining districts.
With regard to the relation of alcoholism to sexual
offences, we cannot expect to find results of much
ALCOHOLISM AND CRIME. 1G7
value from the investigation of regional incidence, for
crimes of this nature are, of course, very largely
dependent on local conditions whose influence must
in a great measure tend to obscure that of intem-
perance. Thus, for example, the greater drunken-
ness in the seaports or the manufacturing towns as
compared with the agricultural districts may very
likely fail to increase the frequency of crimes of lust
because of the readier opportunities for the legal
satisfaction of the sexual impulse that are furnished
by urban life. And this a 'priori doubt is confirmed
by the statistical facts. Thus, if we compare the
frequency of those sexual offences which we suppose
to be connected with alcoholic excess, viz. rape and
indecent assaults, and defilement of children, in the
several composite areas, we get the following results
(expressed as before in terms of the annual average
proportions of such offences per 100,000 of popula-
tion during the period 1891-1900) : Agricultural
districts, 4-96 ; manufacturing towns, 2*95 ; seaports,
4-50 j mining districts, 5-56. We see from these
figures that while the frequency of this kind of
crime in the mining districts corresponds much as
we should expect with the prevalence of drunkenness,
its incidence in the other districts is governed to a
far greater extent by the urban or rural condition
of the population than by their intemperance or
sobriety.
Another matter of interest in connection with this
category of crimes would be to ascertain whether
there is any trace statistically of a difference in alco-
holic relationship between rape on adults and rape
168 ALCOHOLISM.
on children — whether, that is to say, there is a
greater prevalence of the latter offence in regions
where there is much chronic alcoholism and a lesser
prevalence in regions that are simply drunken.
Since no particulars are given as to the age of the
victim in cases of rape, the only way in which we
can form any idea on this point is through the sta-
tistics of the offences under the Criminal Law
Amendment Act of defilement of children under 13
and under 16 years of age. In the period 1891 —
1900 the distribution of such offences, estimated, as
before, per 100,000 inhabitants, was as follows in the
composite areas: Agricultural districts, 1'3; manu-
facturing towns, 0*69 ; seaports, 1*48 ; mining
districts, r08. Unfortunately, we cannot be certain
that the practice in reporting such cases is uniform,
and that cases which would in one district be returned
under these heads may not elsewhere be included
under rape. On this account the value of the figures
is open to question ; but it will be seen that, quantum
valeant, they bear out to some extent the view which
has been stated. Thus the great centres of chronic
alcoholism, the seaports, show the maximum frequency
of these offences, while the mining districts, where
simple drunkenness is most rife, occupy a far lower
place on the scale, though, as we have just seen,
they have the highest rate for sexual offences taken
as a whole.
This brings us to the close of our review of the
evidence bearing on the relation of intemperance to
the graver varieties of crime. Summarising our
results, we may assert that it appears probable that
ALCOHOLISM AND CRIME. 169
alcoholism is the cause of a large proportion, possibly
of some 60 per cent., of homicidal offences, and of a
smaller though still considerable proportion of crimes
of lust ; but that in the other important category of
serious delinquency, namely crimes of acquisitiveness,
its influence is relatively insignificant. And we may
further assert that nearly always in homicidal crimes,
and very frequently in sexual crimes, the alcoholic
condition which genefrates the criminal impulse is the
chronic intoxication, and not casual drunkenness.
CHAPTER X.
ALCOHOLISM AND INSANITY.
In endeavouring to determine the part that alco-
holism plays in the causation of insanity, our chief
difficulty arises from the very complex relation in
which intemperance stands to mental disease. On
the one hand, as was pointed out in Chapter IV, an
acute or subacute insanity^ usually of a characteristic
type, is a frequent episode in the course of the chronic
intoxication, while a state of more or less pronounced
dementia is often one of its ultimate results. In
such instances, where the original condition of the
drinker's nervous system wa^ relatively normal, we
can have no hesitation in attributing the insanity
directly and fully to alcoholism.
But, on the other hand, it also happens, and pos-
sibly with greater frequency, that, instead of being
the cause of mental disease, intemperance is its con-
sequence. An individual, for example, in the early
stage of insanity, or predisposed to disease by inherent
weakness of mind, is notoriously apt to show his
debility by a tendency to convivial excess, especially
if he lives in a milieu where such excess is common.
This is very often seen in general paralysis, and in
other mental disorders ; and in one such affection,
ALCOHOLISM AND INSANITY. 171
indeed, which is more often talked of than seen, viz.
the so-called dipsomania, the periodic development
of an irresistible impulse to excessive drinking may
be the only obtrusive symptom of a psychical
degeneracy allied to epilepsy.
Of course, in all cases of this sort the alcoholic
poisoning is likely to aggravate the morbid state ;
and where the original debility of mind is relatively
slight the intoxication may be an important force in
converting the latent disposition into a positive
insanity. But, though we may thus in a sense speak
of alcohol in such circumstances being a cause of
this insanity, it is very clear that it is so in a quite
different and, from a social point of view, in a much
less important manner than when it acts as the solo
agent in bringing about mental decay in the
healthy. It is even conceivable that in some in-
stances its influence in hastening the breaking down
of unstable and defective organisations may be of
real advantage to the community. It is true, also,
no doubt that many of the degenerates of this type
are themselves heredo-alcoholics, and owe their in-
feriority of brain originally to the parental intoxica-
tion, so that ultimately their insanity, too, may be
set down to the account of alcoholism. This fact,
however, to which we shall subsequently return in
discussing the connection of alcoholism with human
degeneration, need not occupy us here: for the
moment our concern is solely with the action of
alcohol as a cause of insanity in the individual
drinker, and from this point of view the distincti(»n
to which we have referred between its influence on
172 ALCOHOLISM.
the healthy and on the degenerate brain is wholly
valid and is of very real importance.
It is evident, therefore, from the foregoing con-
siderations, that if we are to arrive at a correct
estimate of the amount of the alcoholic contribution
to mental disease, we must be able to separate these
different modes of relation which may connect in-
temperance and insanity. On this account statistics
which show nothing but the co-existence of the two
conditions, or which attribute a causal influence to
alcoholism on no better grounds than a history of
drunkenness prior to the recognition of lunacy, are
of small value. And, unfortunately, much of the
available information on the matter is open to this
objection.
The defect in question is conspicuously evident in
the statistics that immediately concern us here, those,
namely, referring to the causation of insanity in this
country, which are furnished in the annual reports
of the Commissioners in Lunacy. The tables of
causation in these reports are based on the state-
ments of the patients and the patients' friends.
They represent accordingly, even if we assume a fair
measure of intelligence and candour in the informants,
merely a series of inferences drawn from a very
partial knowledge of the conditions existent before
the development of the disease.
It is obvious that in such circumstances the in-
fluence of alcoholism is almost certain to be over-
rated, and this the more readily because intemperance,
being easily thought of, and being besides often
looked on as an individual failing which does not
ALCOHOLISM AND INSANITY. 173
reflect on the sanity of the stocky will, as a rule,
receive more notice than other and possibly more
important facts in the patient^s history.
There is, therefore, a strong antecedent probability
that estimates of the importance of alcoholism as a
cause of insanity formed in this way will err on the
side of excess. And actual examination of the figures
will fully confirm us in this scepticism as to their value.
An excellent example for our purpose is to be found in
the report of the Commissioners in Lunacy for the
year 1905, which enters at some length into this
very question. In that report intemperance is given
as the assigned cause of insanity in 15*9 per cent.
(22*7 per cent, of males, and 9*4 per cent, of females)
of cases admitted to the asylums of England and
Wales during the five years 1899-1903. The pro-
portion of cases of this supposed causation varies in
different asylums between 3 and 40 per cent, and in
different counties between 3*1 and 25*3 per cent.
These figures do not differ very widely from the
average returns of previous years.
Now, if these statistics really represent the degree
of the alcoholic influence in the causation of insanity,
we should naturally expect that a factor of such high
relative importance, and, above all, one exhibiting
such a wide range of local variation, would be likely
to produce a perceptible effect on the regional dis-
tribution of the latter phenomenon, so that where
alcoholic insanity was most frequent there would
probably be, by reason of this additional contribution,
a greater prevalence of insanity in general. The
facts, however, are quite otherwise. By comparing
174
ALCOHOLISM.
the several counties^ on the one hand, with regard
to the relative frequency of cases of "insanity
ascribed to intemperance/^ measured in percentages
of the total admissions during the year 1903, and,
on the other hand, with regard to the ratio of the
insane to the total population, as ascertained at the
last Census, the Commissioners show that there is no
correspondence between the two conditions, but that.
Counties.
Glamorgan
Northumberland
Admissions
into asylums
with history of
previous
intemperance.
Per cent.
25-3
24-4
Eatio of insane
to 1000 of
population.
Per mille.
2-47
2-35
Lancashire
21-0
2-75
Staffordshire
20-4
2-44
Oxfordshire
18-7
3-71
Yorkshire, N.R.
17-9
2-33
Wiltshire .
17-6
4-10
Yorkshire, W.R.
17-0
1-90
■X- -x- ^
■x- ^
-X- -x-
Monmouth
6-2
3-00
Cornwall .
6-0
2-78
Isle of Wight
Devon
4-8
3-9
3-40
3-35
Dorset
3-9
3-61
Denbigh .
r
2-36
Anglesea .
2-96
Carnarvon
3-1
2-30
Flint
2-68
Merioneth .
2-58
ALCOHOLISM AND INSANITY. 175
on the contrary, '^ certain counties with a compara-
tively low rate of insanity show a high proportion of
cases admitted with a history of intemperance, and
vice versa.'' The above table from the blue-book,
giving the figures for a number of the counties at
each end of the scale of presumed alcoholic insanity,
will make the contrast clear.
Of course, it will be observed that this way of
putting the facts is somewhat fallacious, in that the
proportion of cases with a history of intemperance is
expressed in percentages of the number of admis-
sions, and not in terms of any fixed population, and
will, therefore, be unduly high where the general
insanity rate is low : in the above table, for instance,
the 17*6 per cent, of such cases in Wiltshire, where
the insane are in the proportion of 4*1 per thousand
of population, will evidently mean more than the
percentage of 25*3 in Glamorgan, where the general
insanity rate is only 2*47 per mille.
No doubt this faulty method, as well as the pau-
city of the numbers (which are calculated on a single
year's admissions), may have something to do witli the
anomalous results shown in the table which we have
quoted. But, even when the possible errors from
these sources have been allowed for, there still re-
mains a divergence between the incidence of insanity
in general and that of insanity with a history of
intemperance which would be very difficult to account
for if the statistics under the latter head really ro-
presented the amount and distribution of the mental
disease caused by alcoholism.
And such an interpretation will seem still more
176 ALCOHOLISM.
improbable when it is observed that the regional in-
cidence of these cases appears to be quite independent
of the frequency of chronic alcoholism, while it cor-
responds very fairly with that of drunkenness.
Counties, for instance, such as Durham, Glamorgan,
the West Riding of York and other mining districts,
which are relatively low in the scale of alcoholic mor-
tality, but have very high rates of drunkenness, show
also a very high proportion of cases of insanity with a
history of intemperance. In such circumstances the
obvious inference is, that the association of the two
conditions is merely a result and expression of the
convivial tendencies of the given population, which
are shown, of course, no less clearly by its weak-
minded than by its sane elements.
In short, then, since we find that these cases classed
as insanity due to intemperance may be conspicuously
frequent where there is least chronic alcoholism,
though we know that it is the chronic intoxication
that mainly produces disease of mind — and that
they are notably frequent, too, where the general
insanity rate is lowest, though an added alcoholic
influence might be expected to raise that rate — we
are certainly justified in concluding that they are
not trustworthy evidence on the question at issue,
and that estimates of the importance of alcoholism as
a cause of insanity based on such statistics are
utterly unreliable. As to the extent of the error
arising from this cause, it is difficult to hazard any
conjecture. That it is probably large is suggested
by the fact that in a great majority of the instances
where insanity is attributed to drink intemperance
ALCOHOLISM AND INSANITY. 177
is described as the exciting and not as the pre-
disposing cause of the disease. If we assume, as we
safely may, that in a considerable proportion of such
cases the predisposition was the important factor,
we should rate the alcoholic contribution a good
deal below the 15'9 per cent, which is the figure
assigned to it in the official tables of causation.
And that such a correction is needed is also suggested
by the figures in a number of asylum reports in which
a distinction is established between cases of " insanity
due to alcohol " in the sense criticised above and
cases which the asylum physicians regard as presenting
the proper symptoms of alcoholic insanity. Though
the characteristics of true alcoholic insanity are not
always so definite as to admit of our making them an
absolute criterion of this mode of origin, it is certain
that statistics which measured alcoholic causation
by that test rather than by a history of antecedent
excess would be very much nearer the truth.
Unfortunately, the distinction is made in the reports
of only a few asylums ; and, as the relative numbers
of the true and the false alcoholic cases will probably
vary considerably in different localities, it is impossible
to judge to what extent these instances are repre-
sentative of the average conditions. So far as they
go they would suggest that cases of the charac-
teristically alcoholic type constitute rather less than
two thirds of the insanity that is associated with in-
temperance. That this is not, at any rate, far below
the average appears probable from the fact that in
some other countries the proportion has been found
to be even lower. In the Prussian statistics, for
12
178 ALCOHOLISM.
instance, while the insanity due to alcohol is esti-
mated at 23 per cent, of the total, the ratio of
alcoholic insanity is only 1 1 per cent. And we may
apparently interpret in the same way the results
found in a recent inquiry on this subject, conducted
by the American Committee of Fifty, which showed
that insanity was attributed to drink in 24*22 per cent,
of the patients observed, but that only a little over
half that number (viz. 12*22 per cent.) were genuine
alcoholics. Similar conclusions were reached in
an investigation of the same nature some years
earlier by the Massachusetts Labour Bureau, viz.
20*86 per cent, of cases were supposed to be due to
alcohol, but only 16*49 per cent, were excessive
drinkers. It may perhaps be worth mentioning as
an interesting illustration of the danger of post hoc
proj)ter lioc reasoning in regard to pseudo-alcoholic
cases that in both these inquiries total abstinence
was found to be much more frequent than intemper-
ance as an antecedent of insanity.
The conclusion, then, to which these various con-
siderations bring us is that in this country the pro-
portion of cases of certified insanity in which alco-
holism is the essential cause of disease falls a good
deal short of the 16 per cent, at which it is rated
in the official statistics, and may possibly be some-
thing under 10 per cent.
This view would accord with the fact that in the
regional distribution of insanity it is difficult to trace
any evidence of alcoholic influence such as might be
expected if alcoholism really accounted for a sixth
of the total number of cases. No such influence, at
ALCOHOLISM AND INSANITY.
179
all events, is apparent in the following table, which
gives the insanity rate per million inhabitants accord-
ing to the census returns of 1891 in twenty-nine
English counties and in North and South Wales.
The counties within the metropolitan area are not
included in this list, nor are the smaller counties
which do not support separate asylums, viz. Bedford,
Huntingdon, Westmoreland, Cumberland, Leicester,
and Rutland. The figures for these counties would
Mentally Deranged {exclusive of Congenital Cases) per
Million living in Certain of the Registration
Counties of England and in North and South
Wales.
County.
1891.
County.
1891.
Wiltshire .
6354
Buckinghamshire
3046
Berkshire .
6268
Somerset .
3039
York, East Riding
r 4644
Sussex
. 2903
Hereford .
4562
Stafford .
2869
Gloucester .
4487
Cheshire
2825
Northampton
4424
Lancashire .
2776
Worcester .
4850
South Wales
2683
Shropshire .
4153
North Wales ^
2627
Oxford
4054
Nottingham
2606
Norfolk .
. 3758
Warwick .
2422
Monmouth .
3659
Lincoln
2416
Dorset
3513
Northumberland
2376
Devon
3425
York, West Riding
r 2135
Hampshire .
3179
Durham
1691
Suffolk
3127
Derby
1462
Cornwall .
3123
York, North Ridin
g 610
Cambridge .
. 3047
180 ALCOHOLISM.
be obviously misleading, as the accumulation of the
insane of several counties in a single institution would
necessarily swell the insanity rate in the district con-
taining the asylum, and would unduly lower the rate
in the other counties.
Comparing these figures with the table on pp. 66,
67, it is evident that the distribution of insanity
does not correspond very closely either with that of
alcoholism or with that of drunkenness. Thus Lan-
cashire, Warwick, and Cheshire, which rank very
high in the scale of alcoholism, and the mining
counties, where drunkenness is most rife, are alike
in showing very low rates of insanity. The diverg-
ence is perhaps rather greater in the case of drun-
kenness than in that of the chronic intoxication ;
but in both it is sufficiently marked to show that
neither of these manifestations of intemperance has
a very important influence on the statistical move-
ment of lunacy.
Of course, it has to be borne in mind that through-
out this discussion we are referring solely to cases
of certified insanity. And it is this limitation pro-
bably which explains the relatively low estimate we
have been led to form of the alcoholic influence.
For while some affection of mind is, as we have seen,
amongst the usual results of chronic alcoholism, it
is commonly so moderate in degree, or, if more
intense, is so transitory in duration, that it very
frequently does not bring the drinker within the
walls of an asylum. Cases of delirium tremens, for
instance, are treated in hospitals or other institu-
tions ; alcoholic dements drift very generally into
ALCOHOLISM AND INSANITY. 181
the vagrant class, or into the floating population of
the prisons and workhouses. Such cases, there-
fore — and they probably constitute the larger part
of the mental disease due to intemperance — are not
included in the official statistics of insanity, and on
that account are not reckoned in our estimate of
the contribution that alcoholism makes to lunacy.
CHAPTER XI.
ALCOHOLISM AND HUMAN DEaENERA-
TION.
/ The injurious influence of parental intemperance
jpn the physical and mental development of the off-
spring, though often referred to by earlier writers,
hardly became the matter of exact observation before
the second half of the last century.) In 1849 Magnus
Huss, in the classic work which laid the foundation
of the scientific study of alcoholism, emphasised the
importance of this influence in the brandy-drinking
population of his own country. fAnd Morel, when,
a few years later, he brought into mental medicine
the fruitful conception of degeneracy, gave to
parental intoxication a foremost place amongst the
agencies capable of giving rise to this decadent
te^dency.\
( From fliat time the writers who have followed
iftfss in the study of alcoholism, and those who have
followed Morel in the study of degeneracy, have
been practically unanimous in confirming and ex-
tending the views of these masters as to the mutual
relation of the two phenomena ; and it may be safely
aiflrmed that the importance of this relation is not
nowadays a matter of doubt to anyone who is
ALCOHOLISM AND DEGENERATION. 188
brought into actual contact with the subject, whether
from the side of the causal intoxication in the parents
or from the side of the resultant states of decadence
in the succeeding generations.)
Of recent years, however,/the reality of this in-
fluence of parental intoxication has been occasionally
called in question on a priori grounds by some
extremists of the school which repudiates the trans-
mission of acquired characters. It is, however,
perfectly obvious that a doctrinal objection of this
sort is quite irrelevant ; the effects attributed to
parental alcoholism are not in the category of
transmitted acquirements at all ; they are the results,
expressed in defect and deviation of development, of
a deleterious influence exerted on the germ-cells,
either directly through the alcohol circulating in
the blood, or indirectly through the deterioration of
the parental organism in which these cells are lodged
and from which they draw their nutriment. We
have no reason whatever to anticipate that such
cells will be more resistant to the influence of changes
in the nature of their pabulum than are bacteria,
for instance, to changes in their culture media;
rather, indeed, might we expect that the germ-cells
would react in a more evident manner to such in-
fluences, in view of the infinitely greater complexity
of intimate structure implied in their immense
potentialities of development.
By other critics the importance of alcoholism as
an agent in causing unfavourable variations in the
stock has been disputed on different and more rational
grounds. It has been argued that since it tends to
184 ALCOHOLISM.
eliminate the inferior elements of the community,
the ultimate effect of intemperance should be bene-
ficial, and more clearly beneficial, too, the more
its destructive influence affected the vitality of
the degenerate offspring as well as that of the
degenerate parents. That such a selective tendency
does in fact operate is, of course, unquestioned ; as
Fere has pointed out, it is one of the characteristics
of the degenerate that they are prone to have re-
course to the poisons, like alcohol and morphia,
which hasten their decadence and elimination. And,
therefore, alcohol might certainly be adjudged a
salutary evil if its incidence were limited to in-
dividuals whose extreme inferiority of organisation
renders them wholly undesirable and useless to the
community. But this is very far from being the
case. Quite apart from the fact that the degeneracy
that may involve a predisposition to alcoholic or
other drug habits is a vague condition, and, even
when more precisely defined, a relative and change-
able condition which may quite well consist with the
individual being more rather than less useful to the
community — quite apart from this very pregnant
consideration, we have to bear in mind that, in the
circumstances of modern life, the part of mental
degeneracy, of whatever degree, in causing intem-
perance is practically negligeable in comparison with
the influence of industrial conditions. However
highly, therefore, we might rate its potency as an
agent in the elimination of the unfit, we cannot
doubt that such beneficial effect as it may thus
produce is considerably outweighed by its detrimental
ALCOHOLISM AND DEGENERATION. 185
action on the healthy stocks which are exposed to its
influence as a consequence of their social environ-
ment. So that in the ultimate result alcoholism
may be counted on to make a good many more
degenerates than it is likely to destroy.
X^The disorders of development in the offspring
feat may result from parental intoxication, whether
by alcohol or by other poisons, are, of course, very
diverse in character and in extent; they vary from
slight degrees of mental instability to the lowest
grades of idiocy ,| and from a moderate enfeeblement
of vitality to an' extreme defect expressed in still-
birth or abortion. They are in their action essen-
tially similar to the effects obtained by experimental
intoxication in the lower animals. Combemale, for
instance, found that pups begotten on a healthy bitch
by an alcoholised dog were congenitally feeble, and
showed a marked degree of asymmetry of the brain.
And recent experiments designed to disprove the
transmission of acquired characters incidentally give
evidence of the same sort. In one series of such
experiments, for instance, Lustig ascertained that
when cocks by a process of slow intoxication with
abrine had been rendered immune to ordinarily fatal
doses of that drug, their offspring, which, of course,
did not inherit this immunity, showed clear traces of
the influence of the parental poisoning, being few in
number, of low vitality, stunted, and often deformed in
growth. And like results have been found by others.
The recorded observations of the effects that are
similarly induced in human beings by the agency of
alcohol form an enormous mass of literature, only a
186 ALCOHOLISM.
small part of which, however, need be referred to
here, to give the necessary precision to our ideas.
These observations are of two kinds, differing from
one another in their point of departure. In the
first class the matter of investigation is the frequency
of alcoholism in the ancestry of the degenerate ; in
the second class it is the frequency of degeneracy
amongst the descendants of the alcoholic.
Kecords of the former sort are very much more
numerous but for obvious reasons are also very
much less valuable. Parental drunkenness is, in
fact, one of the most easily traced antecedents, and
is pretty sure, therefore, to figure disproportionately
amongst the assigned causes of defect; and in
many cases it will very probably get the credit of
determining in the stock a degenerative tendency
which really existed prior to it, and of which, indeed,
it may have been merely a symptom. This may,
perhaps, be a partial explanation of the extremely
high estimates of some writers, who rate the influence
of alcoholism so highly that very little room is left
for the operation of any other degenerative agency.
But though for these reasons we may not lay too
much stress on the absolute results of many of the
statistical inquiries conducted on this system, we are
forced, nevertheless, to recognise that, even at the
lowest estimate, they have the value that must
attach to opinions based on wide experience and
formed by trained judgments, and that, therefore,
their agreement in general trend is in itself strong
evidence of the importance of alcoholism in causing
impairment of development.
ALCOHOLISM AND DEGENERATION. 187
It is accordingly rather as indications of the fact
of this alcoholic influence than as true measures of
its extent that statistics of this sort are of interest.
Looked at in this light, they show that in the most
varied forms of defect — amongst idiots, epileptics,
prostitutes, feeble-minded criminals, and in short in
all the abnormal classes — parental alcoholism is one
of the most frequent antecedents. In epilepsy, for
instance, in different series of observations it has
been held the causal influence in 21 per cent. (Wil-
dermuth), in 28 per cent. (Wartmann), in 20'2 per
cent. (Doran). In idiocy it was noted by Bourne-
ville in the father in 471 cases, in the mother in 84
cases, and in both parents in 65 cases out of a
thousand; and in 150 idiots and imbeciles whose
family history was fully investigated by Tredgold it
was present in 46*5 per cent, of the cases, usually,
however, in association with insanity or other neuro-
pathic conditions. In prostitutes, again, it has been
found in 82 per cent. (Mme. Tarnowsky) and in
juvenile criminals of weak intellect in 42 per cent.
(Monkemoller) .
Even more striking results with regard to the
several forms of degeneracy were obtained by
Legrain, who investigated the question from a some-
what different point of view. Selecting from the
material at his disposal all those cases in which
ancestral intemperance had appeared to exercise a
causal influence, and working out their family history,
he collected 215 observations of heredo-alcoholism
referring to one generation, 98 referring to two
generations, and 7 referring to three generations.
188 ALCOHOLISM.
Of the cliildren of the first generation, 508 in
number, 196 were mentally degenerate, the affection
of the brain being shown more particularly by moral
and emotional abnormality, while intellectual defects
were less pronounced ; 106 were insane, 52 were
epileptic, 16 suffered from hystero-epilepsy, and 3
from chorea ; and 39 had convulsions in infancy.
Amongst the children of the second generation, wh^^
numbered 294, the intellectual defects were more
marked, idiocy, imbecility, or debility being noted
in the offspring of 54 out of the 98 families investi-
gated. In 23 out of the 33 families in which
the children of the second generation had reached
adult age, one or more of them were insane. Epi-
lepsy was found in 40 families, infantile convulsions
in 42, and meningitis in 14. The third generation in
7 families was represented by 17 children, all of
whom were weak-minded, imbecile, or idiotic ; 2
suffered, moreover, from moral insanity, 2 from
hysteria, and 2 from epilepsy ; 3 were scrofulous,
and 4 had convulsions in childhood. In the three
generations taken together there were, in addition to
the children referred to above, 174 infants who were
dead-born or died shortly after birth.
In many of these instances, of course, and par-
ticularly in researches such as those of Legrain,
which start from the consideration of extreme forms
of defect, the parental alcoholism is associated with
other degenerative factors ; and it may, no doubt, at
times, as we have already pointed out, be regarded
as merely a secondary expression of the influence of
these agencies. This is an explanation, however,
ALCOHOLISM AND DEaENBRATION. 189
which we cannot press very far ; for quite apart from
the direct knowledge which we have of the possible
effects of parental intoxications the internal evidence
of the figures alone will often suffice to show the in-
dependent and essentially different position of alco-
holism in connection with degeneracy. A striking
illustration of this point is furnished by some recent
researches of Grrassmann. He finds that in the
ancestry of the insane who belong to the degenerate
type the conditions that are most frequently traced
are insanity and alcoholism. But in their relation
to the family history these two conditions present a
remarkable difference ; insanity is found, not only in
the parents of the insane, but also, and even much
more frequently, in the grandparents and in the
collateral line ; while alcoholism, on the contrary,
when it is met with, is chiefly observed in the father
or mother, and hardly occurs indeed in other rela-
tives with sufficient frequency to entitle it to any
special significance. Obviously such a contrast
would not appear if parental alcoholism were, like
parental insanity, a mere manifestation of a degene-
rate taint, and not, as it really is, its direct and
efficient cause.
So much, then, for the statistics which refer to
alcoholism in the ancestry of the degenerate. We
have now to deal with the investigations that ap-
proach the question from the opposite side, and
inquire into the incidence of degeneracy in the
children of the alcoholic.
Such investigations have been much fewer in
number, and, as must necessarily result from the
190 ALCOHOLISM.
difficulties of the inquiry, the material handled by
each individual observer has been relatively small in
amount. Some of the most convincing observations,
indeed, refer to single families ; such, for instance,
is the striking case mentioned by Galton of a man
who, after begetting several normal children, became
a drunkard and had imbecile offspring ; and such,
again, is the observation recorded by Selvatico-
Estense of a healthy woman who when married to a
drunken husband had five sickly children, dying in
infancy, but in a subsequent union with a healthy
man bore normal and vigorous children. The sig-
nificance of such cases, it may be remarked in
passing, is emphasised by the fact that parallel in-
stances are met with in the other intoxications. In
a case, for example, recorded by Marfan a man
who had had two healthy children acquired the
cocaine habit, and while suffering from the symptoms
of chronic poisoning engendered two idiots.
Of the investigations dealing with the larger
amount of material the most important is that of
Demme. This observer traced the history of the
offspring in 10 sober families and in 10 families where
one or both parents suffered from chronic alcoholism.
The sober families had in all 61 children, of whom 7
died in infancy, 2 were mentally deficient, 2 were de-
formed, and 50 were normal. The alcoholic families
were divided by Demme into three groups. In the
first, made up of 6 families, there was paternal alco-
holism in at least two generations ; of the 30
children in these families 15 died at birth or in early
infancy, 3 were deformed, 3 were imbecile, 2 had
ALCOHOLISM AND DEGENERATION. 191
defective speech, 2 were dwarfisli, 3 suffered from con-
vulsions, and only 2 were normal. In the second group,
comprising 3 families, in which chronic alcoholism in
the fathers was the only taint, the number of children
was 20, and of these 7 died in infancy, 2 were weak-
minded, 2 were choreic, 1 was dwarfish, 1 was epi-
leptic, and 7 were normal. Finally, in the third
division, which comprised only one family, both
parents were alcoholic, and of the 6 children none
were normal, 3 died of convulsions within six months
of birth, 1 was imbecile, 1 dwarfish, and 1 epileptic.
This last observation of Demme^s leads us to the
consideration of the effect on the offspring when, in
addition to or independently of the paternal intoxi-
cation, the mother suffers from alcoholism. Since
under these circumstances the influence of the ger-
minal poisoning may be reinforced by the direct
action of alcohol on the embryo during pregnancy,
we should naturally expect that the interference
with the normal course of development would be
thereby increased. And this presumption of the
greater gravity of maternal intemperance is fully
confirmed by the facts. Thus in a personal investi-
gation carried out some years ago it was ascertained
that of 600 children born of 120 drunken mothers
335 (55*8 per cent.) died in infancy or were still-
born, and that several of the survivors were mentally
defective, and as many as 4*1 per cent, were epileptic.
Many of these women had female relatives, sisters
or daughters, of sober habits and married to sober
husbands ; on comparing the death-rate amongst
the children of the sober mothers with that amongst
192
ALCOHOLISM.
the children of the drunken women of the same
stock, the former was found to be 23*9 per cent.,
the latter 55*2 per cent., or nearly two and a half
times as much. It was further observed that in the
drunken families there was a progressive rise in the
death-rate from the earlier to the later born children,
as shown by the following figures, giving the per-
centages of stillbirths and deaths in infancy in
groups formed according to the order of birth :
Cases.
Dead and
dead-born.
Dead-bom
Per cent.
Per cent.
1st born
. 80
. 33-7
. 6-2
2nd born
. 80
50-0
. 11-2
3rd born
. 80
52-6
. 7-6
4th and 5th born
. Ill
65-7
. 10-8
6th to 10th born
. 93
72-0
. 17-2
The type of alcoholic family suggested by these
figures — a type characterised by a regular decrease
of vitality in the successive children — was frequently
realised in individual cases, as, for instance, in one
observation where the first three children were
healthy, the fourth was of defective intelligence, the
fifth was an epileptic idiot, the sixth was dead-born,
and finally the reproductive career ended with an
abortion.
The high rate of stillbirths and abortions and the
frequency of epilepsy in the surviving children in
these observations is specially noteworthy, as they
prove that the detrimental effect of maternal alco-
holism must be in a large measure due to a direct
ALCOHOLISM AND DEGENERATION. 193
influence on the germ-cells and on the developing
embryo, and cannot be explained as merely a result
of the neglect and malnutrition from which the
children of a drunken mother are naturally apt to
suffer. Of course, the latter indirect influence also
comes into play, and will, no doubt, have a greater
effect just because it falls on children whose vitality
is initially low.
In this connection we have also to bear in mind
another biological mode of influence, namely that
related to lactation. Regarding that function in the
alcoholic two points have to be considered. In the
first place, when excessive amounts oE alcohol are
taken traces of it pass off in the milk, and in this
way the child nursed by a drunken mother may be
directly affected. The quantity present in the milk
is, of course, small, but, owing to the extreme
susceptibility of the immature nervous centres, it
may produce serious effects on the child, and there
are, in fact, numerous cases on record of convulsions
and other disorders occurring in infants when the
nurse has taken liquor, and ceasing when she has
been put on a non-alcoholic diet. The point is of
some practical importance, because amongst the un-
educated classes there is a deeply-rooted superstition
that liquor, particularly porter, is a sovereign tonic
for nursing mothers.
But there is also another and, perhaps, more
important manner in which alcoholism influences
lactation. It has been shown by Bunge, of Basle,
that in a considerable number of cases the inability
to suckle appears to be related to chronic alcoholism,
13
194 ALCOHOLISM.
either in the individual or in one or other of her
parents. Bunge worked out his conclusions from
observations on 1629 women whose habits, and in
most cases the habits of their parents, with regard to
alcohol were ascertained. Dividing his cases into
three classes, according to the nursing capacity of
the women and their mothers, he found that in the
first class, where both generations were able to suckle,
the percentage of alcoholic excess, meaning thereby
the daily consumption of over two litres of beer, was
in the women themselves 1*1, in their mothers 1*1,
and in their fathers 9'5. In the next group, where
the mothers had been able to nurse, but the younger
generation had lost the capacity, the percentages of
excess were, in the daughters 4*9, in the mothers
2*9, and in the fathers 77'9. The last group, where
both generations were incapable of nursing, showed
percentages of alcoholism in the daughters amounting
to 3 "6, in their mothers to 3*5, and in their fathers
to 30'7. Bunge further noted that in the families
of drunkards where there were several daughters it
often happened that the earlier born were able to
nurse their children, but the younger, begotten when
the father was more profoundly intoxicated, were
unable to do so. This diminished capacity of suckling
must clearly reinforce in no small degree the other
detrimental influences of parental intemperance, and
help to bring about a further lowering of vitality in
th^ heredo-alcoholic.
jjffhrough these several modes of influence, there-
forenit is evident that parental alcoholism is capable
of causing a grave deterioration in the stock ; and
ALCOHOLISM AND DEGENERATION. 195
this conclusion, as we have seen, is established alike
by the results of inquiry into the ancestry of the
degenerate and by investigations touching the pos-
terity of the alcoholicj
When, however, we endeavour to bring the ques-
tion to the test of general statistics with a view to a
more precise estimate of its importance, we meet
with more serious difficulties, which appear to be, at
all events for the moment, insuperable. These
difficulties depend mainly on the fact that the effects
attributable to parental alcoholism have nothing
specific about them ; they are frequently induced by
other causes, and very often by causes which are
apt to occur in association with alcoholism, either
independently or as influences that promote intoxi-
cation or are amongst its indirect results. Thus,
for instance, we have no means of distinguishing
the part that parental intoxication plays in the
infantile mortality of slum life from the part which
belongs to foul air, bad or insufficient food, lack of
clothing, and so forth. Nor, again, can we say
precisely, when we observe the frequency of pre-
cocious criminality in the children of the alcoholic
and its greater incidence in the centres of alcoholism,
how far this association is the expression of an
innate defect in the juvenile offender, due to the
parental poisoning, and how far it is a result of
moral abandonment and evil surroundings in child-
hood.
And if in the case of such conditions as idiocy
and epilepsy difficulties of this sort are less trouble-
some, we have other obstacles of an equally serious
196 ALCOHOLISM.
nature in the character of the statistical material,
which is scanty and imperfect, and is, moreover,
owing to the disturbing influence of large institutions,
apt to be misleading in its indications of regional
incidence. For these reasons, accordingly, there is
little likelihood that we shall find any clear cor-
respondence when we attempt to compare the local
or periodic distribution of alcoholism with that of any
of the evidences of degeneracy to which we have
referred, although direct observation may have satis-
fied us that they frequently result from parental
intemperance. It is difficult, for instance, to dis-
cover any parallelism between the distribution of the
congenitally insane and feeble-minded in the English
counties and the incidence of alcoholism or of
drunkenness in the same areas. This want of
correspondence can be seen on comparing the
accompanying table showing the proportion per
million living of the congenitally lunatic in the
several counties with the figures given on pages QQj
67, referring to drunkennessj alcoholic mortality,
and suicidal attempts. The relatively low rate of
congenital defect in counties so drunken as Durham
and so alcoholic as Lancashire contrasts with the
high figures shown for many of the agricultural
counties.
In France, again, where, owing to the military
returns, fuller statistical information on the matter
is accessible, efforts to show a correspondence between
alcoholism and epilepsy have been equally incon-
clusive : the proportion of cases dispensed from
military service for that neurosis is not larger in the
ALCOHOLISM AND DEGENERATION. 197
northern departments, where alcoholism is most rife,
than in the south, where it is rarest.
It seems, therefore, that we must be content, at all
events for the moment, to rest in the conclusion that,
while the fact and the nature of the detrimental in-
fluence of parental intoxication are beyond question,
its extent can only be inferred indirectly from the
prevalence of chronic alcoholism. Nor even in this
Mentally Deranged from Birth — Proportion per Mil-
lion living at the Census of 1891 in Certain
Registration Counties <f England and in North
and South Wales.
County.
1891.
County.
1891.
Buckingham
797
Nottingham .
311
Wiltshire
525
Lincoln
304
Shropshire .
475
Sussex
301
Suffolk
452
Worcester .
296
Hereford
432
Northampton
289
Oxford
425
Norfolk
274
Berkshire
402
South Wales
272
Somerset
398
York, North Riding
^ 214
Devon .
365
Stafford
212
Warwick
359
Lancashire .
211
Hampshire .
342
York, West Riding
r 204
Cambridge .
336
Cheshire
192
Northumberland .
320
Derby .
. 192
York, East Riding
317
Durham
183
Cornwall
314
North Wales
. 179
Dorset
312
Monmouth .
178
Gloucester .
312
198 ALCOHOLISM.
way can we hope to form any opinion of reasonable
probability until we know a good deal more than we
yet do regarding the fertility of the alcoholic and
the stage that the intoxication must have reached
before its detrimental, influence aifects the offspring.
Pending that fuller information the utmost we can
presume to conjecture on the matter is that, since
the classes most prone to industrial alcoholism are
also very prone to have excessively large families,
and since the children of the alcoholic appear to
abound in the various categories of the degenerate,
it is, at all events, likely that this action of alcoholism
on the health and vitality of the stock is the most
serious of the evils that intemperance brings on the
community.
A
CHAPTER XII.
CONCLUSIONS.
We have now completed our survey of the problem
of alcoholism from the point of view defined at the
outset of this work ; and, to conclude our task, it
only remains to summarise the salient facts which we
have ascertained in the course of our inquiry, and to
consider very briefly their bearing on the practical
issues of the drink question.
In this recapitulation we shall proceed in a some-
what different order from that which we have followed
hitherto, and will deal in the first instance with the
social consequences of alcoholism, understanding
thereby, as we have already explained at length,
solely the effects that are essentially dependent on
the intoxication of the organism, and not the various
indirect results of wasteful living whose connection
with alcoholic excess is for the most part purely
accidental. Taken in their integrity, the consequences
of alcoholism in j^his narrower sense are the proper
measure of the gravity of intemperance as a social
danger | and a notion of their real magnitude, as
precise as the nature of the case will allow, is, there-
fore, the first condition requisite for seeing the drink
question in its true proportions.
200 ALCOHOLISM.
Envisaging the matter from this point of view, we
saw that, under the circumstances actually prevalent
in this country, /'alcoholism by its action on the
individual drinker may enter into the causation of
suicide, of certain forms of crime, and of insamty;
and further, that, through its detrimental influence
on the development of the drinker's offspring, it may
give origin to various forms of degeneracyv expressed
in more or less marked degrees of either physical or
intellectual defect, or, as is more often the case, of
moral perversion.
This latter transmitted influence of alcoholism we
cannot pretend to estimate with even approximate
accuracy ; we can at most hazard some conjectures
as to its importance, on the one hand from observation
of the degenerative effects of parental intoxications
and on the other hand from our knowledge of the
prevalence of chronic alcoholism in the community.
So far as an opinion can be formed on such data, we
may suspect that it is in this way that intemperance
ultimately does most mischief to society, by furnish-
ing recruits to the ranks of the moral imbecile, the
epileptic, the prostitute, and the other noxious and
'parasitic classes. -
As regards the direct effects of alcoholism on the
drinker, which are shown in disorders of conduct
and in insanity, we can arrive at conclusions of a
more positive sort. The statistical and other evidence
concerning suicide, crime, and lunacy offers the
material from which we may form at least a rough
numerical estimate of the absolute and relative im-
portance of the alcoholic influence in the production of
CONCLUSIONS. 201
these social evils. From this evidence we have been led
to the view that chronic alcoholism is the cause of a
considerable proportion of the suicide in this country,
probably of as much as a fifth of the total amount ;
and further that its influence is tending to increase
in relative importance, and that it has had a large
part in the upward movement of suicide which has
been observed during the last few decades. Similarly
we have concluded that the chronic intoxication is
responsible for about three fifths of the homicidal
crime in England, and that in rather less than half
the cases of sexual crime either chronic alcoholism or
simple drunkenness is the causal condition, the latter
being more usual in rape on adults, while the violation
of children is more often an offence of the chronic
drunkard. In crimes of acquisitiveness, on the other
hand, alcoholism seems to be a practically negligeable
quantity. Finally, as regards insanity, it appears
fairly clear that the alcoholic influence is operative
as the essential cause in only a relatively small pro-
portion of cases, probably in much less than a tenth
of the total number of certified lunatics in the
country.
To sum up, then, we find that the extent of the
alcoholic evil is represented by a considerable con-
tribution to the amount of suicide ; by a share in the
causation of crime which, though small in" relation
to the total mass of delinquency, is of extreme
importance by reason of the specially grave character
of the offences comprised in it ; by a comparatively
small part in the causation of insanity ; and lastly,
by an indefinite but certainly considerable influence
202 ALCOHOLISM.
in the production of many of the conditions of
impaired development which underlie the perverted
conduct of the socially unadaptable classes.
From the same evidence also, confirming on this
point what we had already found in studying alco-
holism in the individual, we can draw another
conclusion of vital significance for the proper appre-
hension of the drink question in this country. That
conclusion, on which we have repeatedly insisted
throughout this work, is that nearly all these graver
effects of intemperance are due to the chronic
intoxication and hardly any to simple drunkenness.^
To this rule one variety of sexual crime forms
practically the sole exception.
The importance of this fact lies, of course, in its
bearing on the question of the social causes of alco-
holism. The chronic intoxication on which the
gravity of intemperance is thus seen to be dependent,
is not a result of convivial excess, or at least is found
to be so only in such a small number of instances as
to be negligeable in a general view of the question.
Its origin is to be sought in a totally different form
of drinking, in what we have termed industrial as
opposed to convivial drinking; that is to say, it is
connected with the use of alcohol as a stimulant for
muscular work. In ultimate analysis, therefore, we
find that the drink question is practically reducible
to the effects of this industrial drinking.
In this conclusion we are confirmed, not only by
the statistical evidence of the local and occupational
incidence of alcoholism in this country, and by the
relation of its periodic oscillations to those of other
CONCLUSIONS. 203
social phenomena, but also by tlie broad indications
that can be traced in a wide view of the history of
intemperance and by the main facts of its geo-
graphical distribution. The vice of drunkenness,
we know, is met with in every epoch of history, and
is common in the most diverse civilisations; the
drink question, on the contrary, which is frequently
but wrongly looked on as its result and multiplied
expression, has been constantly later in appearance
and more limited in extent. In^iP^^.^^d place it
has ever followed industrialism aa a shadow. In the
great civilisations of antiquity drunkenness from con-
vivial excess constituted the whole of intemperance;
there was no extensive development of chronic alco-
holism ; and there was, therefore, no drink question.
Not until the close of the Middle Ages, when feu-
dalism made way for the modern industrial system,
did alcoholism, as we now know it, become a recog-
nisable fact in social history.
And just as in its historical evolution the drink
question thus follows and is dependent on the growth
of industrialism, so in like manner do we find that
at the present day its gravity in the different civi-
lised countries varies in close correspondence with
the degree of their industrial activity. The states
of Southern Europe which have been least affected
by the industrial movement of the last century have
also for that reason suffered least from alcoholism.
And that this is the true explanation of their rela-
tive immunity is clearly evident from the fact that
wherever in these countries there has been within
recent years a beginning of industrialism it has in-
204 ALCOHOLISM.
variably brought in its train all the evils of intem-
perance. Those parts of Spain, for instance, and of
Northern Italy which have latterly become fields of
industrial enterprise have also become centres of
alcoholism ; instead of the traditional sobriety of the
nations of the Latin culture, they already show a
development of alcoholic insanity and alcoholic
crime, and a frequency of drunkenness that may
compare with the intemperate countries of the North ;
here again it is the factory that has created the
drink question.
This dependence of alcoholism on industrial con-
ditions, which is thus evident on a general view of
the historic and regional facts of intemperance, is
traceable even more clearly, and in a form which
makes the mode of relationship at once apparent,
when we examine in detail the drinking traditions
of the various manual trades. Our investigation of
this point showed us that the incidence of alcoholism
in the occupational groups is correspondent with
those drinking traditions which, again, have their
ultimate source in the special character of the labour
in the several forms of industry. On this smaller
scale, therefore, we once more observe the fact of
the industrial origin of alcoholism, and, moreover,
are enabled at the same time to perceive how that
fact finds its explanation in the physiological action
of alcohol.
The final result, then, to which the whole course
of our inquiry has tended, the view which it has
been the chief aim of this essay to establish, is, we
repeat, that in this country i ntemperance as a
CONCLUSIONS. 205
social problem depends essentially on tlio prevalence
of industrial drinking.
The importance of this conclusion is that, if it be
sound, it should considerably modify our views as to
the proper direction of temperance reform. It must
substitute industrial alcoholism for convivial drunken-
ness as the object of the remedial and preventive
measures designed to deal with the evils of intem-
perance; and such a substitution will necessarily
involve far-reaching changes in the character of
these measures. For it is at once obvious from
what we have learned of their nature that convivial
drinking and industrial drinking, depending as they
do on essentially different social conditions, require
correspondingly different methods to influence them.
The prevalence of primary convivial excess depends
very largely on social ideals and customs, and there-
fore changes with the degree of culture and can be
modified by educational and religious influences.
The sobriety of the educated classes in this country
at the present day as compared with their drunken-
ness in the eighteenth century, is a familiar example
of such a progress in manners.
But influences of this kind can, of course, have
little or%o effect on industrial alcoholism. And not
only so, but, as the recent experience of Spain and
Italy, to which we have referred above, shows us,
when industrial drinking is brought into previously
sober communities, it weakens or destroys the efficacy
of these influences, so that pari passu with the
spread of chronic alcoholism and its usual results
there comes also a growth of convivial excess.
206 ALCOHOLISM.
Hence,, to combat even convivial drunkenness in an
industrial community we must begin by dealing
with industrial drinking, which, so long as it per-
sists, will maintain and increase the tradition of
excess.
The proper direction, then, of temperance reform
would, according to this view, be in restraint of in-
dustrial drinking; and, as our study of the factors
of that form of drinking has shown us, it must
mainly aim at modifying those secondary conditions
whose interaction with the fundamental influence of
the character of the work is the determining element
in the production of industrial alcoholism. Now, we
have seen that the recent evolution of industry in
this country is tending more and more to restrict the
operation of these secondary influences; and it is,
therefore, by co-operating with the forces which are
bringing about this natural tendency that our efforts
should have most prospect of success. The possi-
bilities of action in this sense are ample.
The fundamental factors of the social question,
of which alcoholism thus forms a part, lie outside
the scope of this essay ; and we need only note,
therefore, in reference to them, that every influence
that raises the standard of liying, and that betters
the economic position of the worker, will thereby
both directly and indirectly diminish the tendency
to industrial drinking. Shortening of the hours of
labour, which prevents muscular and nervous ex-
haustion ; higher wages and greater regularity of
employment, which secure a sufficient and constant
supply of food and other necessaries for working
CONCLUSIONS. 207 /
effidency ; better housing and better hygienic con- V
ditions in~tbe--wrt)rkshops--these and similar reforms
have had incidentally an impol'tant efPect in weaken-
ing the attraction of alcohol as an industrial
stimulant; and their further development in the
future will doubtless have a similar tendency. But,
of course, this effect was no part of the object of
these reforms ; they were not pursued with a view
to the promotion of temperance, nor do the means
adopted to advance them admit very readily of any
modifications to make them more effective for that
special end ; their progress depends on other forces,
and does not directly concern us here.
Another category of reforms is represented by the
Employers' Liability Acts, which, as we have seen,
have been amongst the most important influences of
recent years in combating alcoholism. These mea-
sures resemble the social reforms referred to above,
in that their effect on alcoholism was an accidental
and indirect result ; but they differ from them in
being susceptible of changes that might materially
strengthen this special tendency in future legislation
of the same sort. The recognition, for instance, that
the responsibility of the employer would not be
impaired in accidents incurred through the drunken-
ness of the workman unless adequate measures were
taken to enforce abstinence during the hours of
labour, would very quickly put a stop to the " tied
factory " system and to the continued tolerance of
the '' bever '' times. And on similar lines provisions
could be readily framed which would give the em-
ployers sufficient motive to repress the custom of
208 ALCOHOLISM.
bringing liquor into docks, coal-yards, and other
such places.
Of measures more specifically directed to deal
with industrial alcoholism, the most obvious and
probably one of the most. efEectiKe, would be the
alteration of the statutory hour of opening licensed
houses. The fixing of this time at even one hour
later than is at present allowed would be likely to
do more to abate the worst effects of alcoholism than
would any extension of Sunday closing.
These instances will suffice to show — and it is
only for this purpose that they are cited here — how
materially the trend of opinion and effort in con-
nection with temperance reform would be altered by
the recognition that the alcoholic evil in this country
is connected very much more with industrial than
with convivial drinking, more with the use of alcohol
as an aid in work than with its use as an aid to
pleasure.
INDEX
Abrine, poisoning by
Absinthe
Alcohol, effect of, on mental processes
on muscular effort
food-value of
individual susceptibility to
Alcoholism, chi'onlc : see Chronic alcoholism.
definition of
individual and social aspects of
recent movement of .
Anchor smiths
Anstie on dosage of alcohol
Antiquity, characters of drinking in
Aschaffenburg on alcohol and work .
Atwater on food-value of alcohol
Beer, carbo-hydrates in
usual industrial drink
Bever times
Blackstone on punishment of drunkenness
Book-folders
Boot and shoe makers
Booth, industrial statistics .
BoiTowing, influence of, on industrial drinking
Boumeville on parental alcoholism .
Brass-workers
PAGE
. 185
. 15
19—21
22—29
30—35
. 29
1
2
129
96
46
4
28
31
34
119
79
41
103, 110
99—102
79,86
. 124
. 187
. 96
14
210 INDEX.
PAGE
Building trades .... 85—89
industrial divisions of . .86
large and small masters in . .88
Bunge on alcoholism and lactation . . , . 193
Camden . . . . . .7
Oan'iage building . . • . . . 89
Chainmakers . . . .96, 110
Chauveau's experiments . . . .32
Chronic alcoholism, chief cause of social dangers of
intemperance . . . . .75
conduct in . . . 50, 51, 54 — 56
dependence on industrial drinking . 60
dose needed to produce . . 46
emotional state in . . .49
lesions of . . . .48
regional distribution of . 66 — 73
Coal-heavers . . . . .85
Coal-miners .... 106—108
absence of industrial drinking amongst . 116
convivial excesses of . . 68, 107
in Scotland . . . .70
Coal-wharfers . . . . . 84
Combemale on parental intoxication . . . 185
Commonwealth, intemperance in time of . .9
Comparative mortality figures . . 68 — 70
Consequences of alcoholism, how defined . . 134
Convivial drinking (see also Drunkenness), characters of 61
Crime, meaning of .... 153
Crimes of acquisitiveness .... 160
of lust . . . .164, 167, 168
of violence .... 160—164, 166
Crothers on pathological drunkenness . . 42
Delirium tremens . . . • .53
death-rate from . . • 131
INDEX.
211
Demme on heredo-alcoholism
Destree's experiments
Dietary, defective, influence of, on drinking habits
118,
value of alcohol in .
Distillation, discovery of
Dock labour
Doran on alcohol and epilepsy
Drunkenness, distribution of
normal, compared with pathological
conduct in .
pathological, causes of
conduct in .
relation to good times
social results of
Du Chaumont's estimate of working diet
Dujardin-Beaumetz on toxicity of alcohols
Employers' Liability Acts, effect of .
Epilepsy, distribution of, in France .
relation of, to parental alcoholism
Ergograph, experiments with
Female labour, influence of
Fere's experiments
Franklin on industrial drinking of printers
Frey's experiments
Furfurol in grain spirit
Gas-stoking
Glass-blowing
Grassmann on heredo-alcoholism
Gregg on alcoholism of cotton operatives
Homicide, see Crimes of Violence.
Hour of opening of public-houses, influence of
PAGB
. 190
. 24
125-127
. 34
6
78-84
. 187
6, 67, 72, 73
. 43
. 40
. 42
42, 43
. 130
. 75
. 35
. 38
14, 122, 207
. 196
187, 188
22—28
. 109
26, 28
102
23
91
92
189
13
120, 208
212
INDEX.
Hours of work, effect of shortening .
Industrial drinking, amount of alcoliol taken in
chief cause of alcoholism
morning livener in
need of continuity in .
organised tradition of
origin of .
probable decrease of .
relation to character of work
to chronic alcoholism
restrictions imposed by masters
special arrangements for
Insanity, alcoholic, characters of
amount of, due to alcoholism .
double relation to intemperance
regional incidence of
Intoxications, parental, effects of
Irregularity of employment, effect of
Italy, industrial alcoholism in
Kassowitz on food value of alcohol .
Kay on alcoholism of cotton operatives
Kraepelin's experiments
Lactation, effect of alcoholism on
Lecky ....
Legrain on heredo-alcoholism
Le Play on drinking of metal workers
Livener, importance of
Lustig's experiments
Macdonell on statistics of homicide .
Maternal alcoholism, effects of
Metal trades
Miura on food-value of alcohol
on
PAGE
122
118
75
120
115
123
7
132
113
60
121-123
123, 124
51, 52
178
170
179
185
118
204
32
12
19, 20, 26, 27
193, 194
7
187, 188
. 94
. 120
. 185
. 159
191, 192
93—97
. 31
INDEX.
213
Monkemoller on parental alcoholism and criminality
Mortillet on early use of fermented liquors
Muscular work, effect of alcohol on .
Ogle on statistics of suicide
Parental alcoholism, frequency of, in degenerate
Parkes on dosage of alcohol -
Partridge's experiments
Pattern makers
Porter, use of, by nursing mothers
Porters, fruit
— tea
Prehistoric drinking
Printers .
lithographic
Restaurants provided by employers
Rossi's experiments
Scheffer's experiments
Schumberg's experiments
Seaports, alcoholism in
■ crime in
Selvatico-Estense on heredo-alcohohsm
Shadwell on mortality from delirium tremens
Smollett
Spain, industrial alcoholism in
Spirits in industrial drinking
impurities in
Stocks as punishment for drunkenness
Subbing . • • •
Suicidal attempts, characteristics of .
frequency of, in Ireland
. generally due to alcoholism
recent increase of
. regional incidence of .
PAGE
187
2
141
classes 187
. 46
21, 25, 29
. 96
. 193
. 83
. 84
3
102-106
. 105
. 125
. 24
. 25
. 33
. 74
166—168
. 190
. 131
. 10
. 204
. 119
15, 38. 39
. 41
79,87
141, 145
144, 145
54,55
. 151
66.67
214 INDEX.
PAGE
Suicide, alcoholic, characters of , . . 146
frequency of . . 147 — 149
• recent growth of . . 150 — 152
regional distribution of . . . 148
methods of, in relation to age . . 146
Tamowski on heredo-alcoholism and prostitution . 187
Tavemari's experiments . . . .25
Textile industries . . . .12, 13, 97—99
Tredgold on heredo-alcoholism and idiocy . . 187
"Wagner on suicide in relation to age . . . 146
Warren's experiments . . . .23
Wartmann on heredo-alcoholism and epilepsy . . 187
Wildermuth on same .... 187
Women, industrial drinking of . . 108 — 111
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