it is the experience of most doctors that
giving any alcohol for illness (though often necessary) is about the
most morally dangerous way of giving it. Instead of giving it to a
healthy person who has many other forms of life, you are giving it to a
desperate person, to whom it is the only form of life. The invalid can
hardly be blamed if by some accident of his erratic and overwrought
condition he comes to remember the thing as the very water of vitality
and to use it as such. For in so far as drinking is really a sin it is
not because drinking is wild, but because drinking is tame; not in so
far as it is anarchy, but in so far as it is slavery. Probably the worst
way to drink is to drink medicinally. Certainly the safest way to drink
is to drink carelessly; that is, without caring much for anything, and
especially not caring for the drink.

The doctor, of course, ought to be able to do a great deal in the way of
restraining those individual cases where there is plainly an evil
thirst; and beyond that the only hope would seem to be in some increase,
or, rather, some concentration of ordinary public opinion on the
subject. I have always held consistently my own modest theory on the
subject. I believe that if by some method the local public-house could
be as definite and isolated a place as the local post-office or the
local railway station, if all types of people passed through it for all
types of refreshment, you would have the same safeguard against a man
behaving in a disgusting way in a tavern that you have at present
against his behaving in a disgusting way in a post-office: simply the
presence of his ordinary sensible neighbours. In such a place the kind
of lunatic who wants to drink an unlimited number of whiskies would be
treated with the same severity with which the post office authorities
would treat an amiable lunatic who had an appetite for licking an
unlimited number of stamps. It is a small matter whether in either case
a technical refusal would be officially employed. It is an essential
matter that in both cases the authorities could rapidly communicate with
the friends and family of the mentally afflicted person. At least, the
postmistress would not dangle a strip of tempting sixpenny stamps before
the enthusiast's eyes as he was being dragged away with his tongue out.
If we made drinking open and official we might be taking one step
towards making it careless. In such things to be careless is to be sane