oneself that here is a
crying abuse which is ruining the unwarned and the unprotected up and
down the land, and which is quite definitely and obviously within the
capacity of legislation to control effectively and finally.

Let us turn now to the general question of the organic or physiological
relations between womanhood and alcohol. Both sexes of human beings are
identical in a vast majority of their characters, and the various
reactions to alcohol come within this number. There is no need to repeat
here any of the facts and conclusions which have been set forth at
length elsewhere. What was said there applies to women as to men. That
is true so far as the individual is concerned and it is also true that,
so far as the race is concerned, the germ-plasm or germ-cells in both
sexes alike may be injured by the continued consumption of large
quantities of alcohol.

There remains the important fact, which it is the present writer's
constant effort to bring to the notice of Eugenists, that alcohol has
special relations to motherhood, to which there can necessarily be no
correspondence in the case of the other sex, and though motherhood, as
such, is not the subject of this book, yet it would be most pedantically
to limit the usefulness which one hopes it may possess if we were to
omit the discussion, as brief as possible, of the effect of alcohol upon
womanhood at the time when womanhood is expressing itself in its supreme
function.

In my book on Eugenics there is merely the briefest allusion in a
foot-note to this subject, and I confess myself now ashamed of having
dealt with it in that utterly inadequate fashion. In practical
eugenics,--though sooth to say when eugenics begins to become practical
many professing eugenists seem to think that it is wandering from the
point--the great fact of expectant motherhood must be reckoned with. To
decline to do so is in effect to declare that we are greatly concerned
with bringing the right germ-cells together, but have nothing to do with
what may or may not happen to the product of their union. We desire,
however, not merely conjugated germ-cells, but worthy men and women, and
expectant motherhood is therefore part of the eugenic province.
Unfortunately it is easier to invent terms and categories and get people
to accept them than to control their use of one's terms thereafter.
Otherwise, I should forbid the use of the term Eugenist at all by anyone
who is unprepared to move a f