ngst women. We know
that in either sex a single bout of drinking, say once a week on
Saturday night, may leave the individual little worse, may injure health
quite inappreciably, if at all; it may not interfere with his work, and
may even be of small economic importance. In such a coal-mining county
as Durham, for instance, where alcohol cannot be drunk in association
with work because the workman and his fellows know that the safety of
their lives will not permit it, we find a huge proportion of arrests for
drunkenness, and it might be supposed that in this most drunken county
in England we should find the highest proportion of permanent
consequences of alcoholism. On the contrary, as Dr. Sullivan says,
"owing to their relative freedom from industrial drinking coal-miners
show a remarkably low rate of alcoholic mortality, ranking in fact with
the agriculturists and below all the other industrial groups." Here is a
simple statistical fact which continues true year by year, and the
significance of which must be insisted upon.

In the case of women, the very obvious and natural tendency is for the
proportion of drunkenness to the alcohol consumed to be much lower than
in the case of men. Drunkenness is commonly the result of convivial
drinking. A company of men get together, and they help each other to get
drunk. Women are not subjected to so many temptations in this respect.
Their drinking is industrial drinking,--above all, at the supreme
industry, which is the culture of the racial life. Like other industrial
drinking, it is less conspicuous than convivial drinking; it leads to
few arrests for drunkenness, but it has far graver effects on the
individual, and it shows its consequences in the industrial product with
which in this case no other industrial product can compare. Now unless
we disabuse ourselves once and for all of the notion that the drink
question is merely the drunkenness question, we shall never succeed in
rightly approaching and dealing with this most ominous development of
modern civilization, to which I have done such imperfect justice in the
present chapter.

Dr. Sullivan[23] has some important remarks on this subject from which
one cannot do better than freely quote. As a distinguished and
experienced Medical Officer in H. M. Prison Service, notably at
Holloway, where so many women have been under his care, Dr. Sullivan has
very special credentials, even if the internal evidence of his book did
not