The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions | Page 3

you can never bring that about by rules and
regulations. I grant that the clusters of drink-shops which are stuck
together in the slums of our big towns are a disgrace to all of us, but if
we closed 99 per cent. of them by Statute we should have the same
drunken crew left. While wandering far and wide over England,
nothing has struck me more than the steady resolution with which men
will obtain drink during prohibited hours; the cleverest administrator in
the world could not frame a network of clauses that could stop them;
one might close every drink-selling place in Britain, and yet those folks
that had a mind would get drink when they wanted it. You may ply
bolts and bars; you may stop the working of beer-engines and taps; but
all will be futile, for I repeat, that only by asserting power over hearts,
souls, imaginations, can you make any sort of definite resistance to the
awe-striking plague that envenoms the world. With every humility I am
obliged to say that many of the good people who aim at reform do not
know sufficiently well the central facts regarding drink and drinkers. It
is beautiful to watch some placid man who stands up and talks gently to
a gathering of sympathizers. The reposeful face, the reposeful voice,
the refinement, the assured faith of the speaker are comforting; but
when he explains that he has always been an abstainer, I am inclined to
wonder how he can possibly exchange ideas with an alcoholized man.
How can he know where to aim his persuasions with most effect? Can
he really sympathize with the fallen? He has never lived with drunkards
or wastrels; he is apart, like a star, and I half think that he only has a
blurred vision of the things about which he talks so sweetly. He would
be more poignant, and more likely to draw people after him, if he had
living images burned into his consciousness. My own set of pictures all

stand out with ghastly plainness as if they were lit up by streaks of fire
from the Pit. I have come through the Valley of the Shadow into which
I ventured with a light heart, and those who know me might point and
say what was said of a giant: "There is the man who has been in hell."
It was true. Through the dim and sordid inferno, I moved as in a trance
for awhile, and that is what makes me so keen to warn those who fancy
they are safe; that is what makes me so discontented with the peculiar
ethical conceptions of a society which bows down before the concocter
of drink and spurns the lost one whom drink seizes. I have learned to
look with yearning pity and pardon on all who have been blasted in life
by their own weakness, and gripped by the trap into which so many
weakly creatures stumble. Looking at brutal life, catching the rotting
soul in the very fact, have made me feel the most careless contempt for
Statute-mongers, because I know now that you must conquer the evil of
evils by a straight appeal to one individual after another and not by any
screed of throttling jargon. One Father Mathew would be worth ten
Parliaments, even if the Parliaments were all reeling off curative
measures with unexampled velocity. You must not talk to a county or a
province and expect to be heard to any purpose; you must address John,
and Tom, and Mary. I am sure that dead-lift individual effort will
eventually reduce the ills arising from alcohol to a minimum, and I am
equally sure that the blind groping of half-informed men who chatter at
St. Stephen's will never do more good than the chatter of the same
number of jackdaws. It is impossible to help admiring Sir Wilfrid
Lawson's smiling courage, but I really do not believe that he sees more
than the faint shadows of the evils against which he struggles; he does
not know the true nature of the task which he has attacked, and he
fancies that securing temperance is an affair of bolts, and bars, and
police, and cackling local councils. I wish he had lived with me for a
year.
If you talk with strong emotion about the dark horror of drink you
always earn plenty of jibes, and it is true that you do give your hand
away, as the fighting men say. It is easy to turn off a light paragraph
like this: "Because A chooses to make a beast of himself, is that any
reason why B, and C, and D should be deprived of a wholesome article
of liquid food?"--and so on. Now, I do not want to trouble