From ‘The Menace of Drink’, The Spectator, 24 April 1915:
Some depressing influence is at work among the very poor which is not poverty, something which makes the full effort after the highest civilization attainable to them seem not worth while. That depressing influence is, as we believe, drink.
“Oh, hold your tongue!” we hear some one say. “Every fanatic, and tract-writer, and cheap moralist, and goody-goody parson, and old-maidish district visitor has been shouting that word for years. We are sick of hearing it. It may be very true that drink is responsible for a small output of munitions, but to make it responsible for the condition of the urban poor is nonsense. Dealers in that argument are altogether too superficial. When will they learn that drink is not a cause but an effect? When will they go down a little deeper and cease this Puritanical cant?”
We do not much wonder at this indignation.
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