ideas would
flow more slowly. But does that indicate that I did wrong in taking
last night, after a hard day's fatiguing work, a glass of sherry and a
glass of champagne at a merry dinner-party, after which nothing but
light conversation and music were planned for the rest of the evening?
Of course, alcohol before serious intellectual work disturbs me; but
hearing a hurdy-gurdy in the street or thinking of the happy news
which a letter has just brought to me, or feeling angry over any
incident, disturbs me just as much. It is all the same kind of
interference; the brain centers which I used for my intellectual
effort are for a while inhibited and thus unfit for the work which I
have in hand. When the slight anger has evaporated, when the
pleasurable excitement has subsided, when the music is over, I can
gather my thoughts again, and it is arbitrary to claim that the short
blockade of ideas was dangerous, and that I ought to have avoided the
music or the pleasure or the wine.

Of course, if we consider, for instance, the prevention of crime, we
ought not to forget that some even of these slight inhibitions may
facilitate a rash, vehement deed and check cool deliberation. In times
of social excitement, therefore, alcohol ought to be reduced. But
again this same effect, as far as the temperate use of alcohol is in
question, may result from many other sources of social unrest. The
real danger begins everywhere with intemperance: that is, with a lack
of that self-discipline which is not learned but lost under the outer
force of prohibition.

_The Case Psychologically_

Psychologically the case stands thus: alcohol has indeed an inhibitory
influence on mind and body. The feeling of excitement, the greater
ease of motor impulse, the feeling of strength and joy, the forgetting
of sorrow and pain--all are at bottom the result of inhibition;
impulses are let free because the checking centers are inhibited. But
it is absurd to claim from the start that all this is bad and harmful,
as if the word inhibition meant destruction and lasting damage.
Harmful it is, bodily and socially, when these changes become
exaggerated, when they are projected into such dimensions that vital
interests, the care for family and honor and duty are paralyzed; but
in the inhibition itself lies no danger. There is not the slightest
act of attention which does not involve such inhibition. If I read in
my study, the mere attention to my book will inhib