in moderate quantities. It obliterates a part of the field of
consciousness and abolishes collateral trains of thought." [Footnote:
Tolstoy also hit the nail on the head in his little essay, Why do Men
Stupefy Themselves?] This use, in relieving brain-tension, in bringing
a transient cheer and comfort to poor, overworked, worried, remorseful
men, is not to be despised. Dull lives are vivified by it, a fleeting
anesthesia of unhappy memories and longings is effected, and for the
moment life seems worth living.

Without considering yet the physical penalty that must be paid for
this evanescent freedom, we may make the obvious remark that it is
a morally dangerous freedom. As the Odyssey has it, "Wine leads to
folly, making even the wise to love immoderately, to dance, and to
utter what had better have been kept silent." Alcohol slackens the
higher, more complicated, mental functions-our conscience, our scruples,
our reason- and leaves freer from inhibition our lower passions and
instincts. We cannot afford thus to submerge our better natures, and
leave the field to our lower selves; it is a dangerous short cut to
happiness. A far safer and more permanently useful procedure for the
individual would be so to live by his reason and his conscience that
he would not need to stupefy them, to forget his life as he is shaping
it from day today. And the lesson to the community is so to brighten
the lives of the poor with normal, wholesome pleasures and recreations,
so to lift from them the burdens of poverty and social injustice, that
they will not so much need to plunge into the grateful oblivion of
the wine-cup.

(5) The most tenacious hold of the alcohol trade lies,
however, in two things not yet enumerated. The one is, that much use
of alcohol creates a pathological craving for it; the man who is