of the next
generation. But in the chaos in which we welter, widows and orphans have
to take their chance. Who will say a good word for the substance which
makes them by tens of thousands in England and Wales alone every year?

At least one economic aspect of this question may, however, be dealt
with here. In a rightly constituted society people are held responsible
for their deeds. Parenthood is a deed; in a very true sense it is a more
deliberate, a more active, more self-determined deed, on the part of the
father than on the part of the mother. At present the only act for which
men are held irresponsible--for our practice amounts to that--is the act
for which, above all others, they should be held responsible. A large
amount of the money now spent by men on alcohol and tobacco, and other
things which shorten their lives, and are needed only because they
create a need for themselves, is really required for the interests of
the race. Such is the double destruction worked by the alcoholic form of
this waste that if the average sum, say six shillings a week, expended
in the working-class family on alcohol, were invested on behalf of the
possible widows and orphans, not only would they be provided for, but
the fathers would be saved, and they would not become widows and
orphans. In days to come it will be discovered that such matters as
these are the real political economy, the absence or presence of
tariffs, the incidence of taxation and the like, being matters of no
consequence or significance whatever compared with the question,
fundamental in all times and places for every nation and for every
individual: For what are you spending: for bread or a stone, for life or
for death?

The foregoing has been chosen for the forefront of this chapter because
of its bearing on a central economic problem of the time, and also
because, for some reason or other, this alcoholic destruction of
fatherhood, though it is of the utmost importance, has hitherto escaped
the attention of sociological students. We pass now to a second point,
of a wholly different character, which particularly well illustrates
certain of the general principles with which we began. The supreme
importance of alcohol or of anything else for human happiness is
attained only through its influence on the selves of men and women. It
is upon these that our happiness depends--upon the nature and the
nurture, from hour to hour, of our selves and the selves with which