The past--unreal. The present--a waking
dream. But the future--ah, the future!

He has not candidly explored far beneath the surface of things
who does not know the strange allure, charm even, that many
loathsome things possess. And drink is peculiarly fitted to
bring out this perverse quality--drink that blurs all the
conventionalities, even those built up into moral ideas by
centuries and ages of unbroken custom. The human animal, for
all its pretenses of inflexibility, is almost infinitely
adaptable--that is why it has risen in several million years of
evolution from about the humblest rank in the mammalian family
to overlordship of the universe. Still, it is doubtful if,
without drink to help her, a girl of Susan's intelligence and
temperament would have been apt to endure. She would probably
have chosen the alternative--death. Hundreds, perhaps
thousands, of girls, at least her equals in sensibility, are
caught in the same calamity every year, tens of thousands, ever
more and more as our civilization transforms under the pressure
of industrialism, are caught in the similar calamities of
soul-destroying toil. And only the few survive who have
perfect health and abounding vitality. Susan's iron strength
enabled her to live; but it was drink that enabled her to
endure. Beyond question one of the greatest blessings that
could now be conferred upon the race would be to cure it of the
drink evil. But at the same time, if drink were taken away
before the causes of drink were removed, there would be an
appalling increase in suicide--in insanity, in the general
total of human misery. For while drink retards the growth of
intelligent effort to end the stupidities in the social system,
does it not also help men and women to bear the consequences of
those stupidities? Our crude and undeveloped new civilization,
strapping men and women and children to the machines and
squeezing all the energy out of them, all the capacity for
vital life, casts them aside as soon as they are useless but
long before they are dead. How unutterably wretched they would
be without drink to give them illusions!

Susan grew fond of cigarettes, fond of whiskey; to the rest
she after a few weeks became numb--no new or strange phenomenon
in a world where people with a cancer or other hideous running
sore or some gross and frightful deformity of fat or
excrescence are seen laughing, joining freely and comfortably
in the company of the