ating drink about _160,000,000l._
per annum. Out of this enormous sum--a sum much larger than the
national Budget--between _100,000,000l._ and _120,000,000l._ is spent
by the working class alone. Drink is a fearful evil in Great Britain.
The average working man spends every year two months' earnings in
drink, and as there are many moderate drinkers and abstainers, there
must be many who spend three months' earnings and more--that is,
one-quarter of their wages, sometimes one-half, and sometimes more
than one-half, on intoxicants. According to some of the foremost
authorities on social science, and according to some of the most
prominent medical men, drink is chiefly responsible for poverty,
underfeeding, ill-health, and racial degeneration. Nevertheless, the
British Socialists, instead of condemning drunkenness, rather
encourage, or at least excuse, this terrible vice; and again, the
universally discredited Iron Law of Wages is solemnly brought forth to
prove "scientifically" that sobriety and abstinence on the part of
the workers would not benefit the workers but the capitalists. "We are
not prepared to admit that, if all workers were to become teetotalers,
as I am, the _140,000,000l._ now spent on intoxicants would benefit
the workers to any appreciable extent. On the contrary, all economists
tell us that wages always tend towards the minimum subsistence
point--the level at which the wage-slave is willing to subsist and to
reproduce his kind."[864]

The Iron Law of Wages has been abandoned by all scientists because of
its manifest absurdity. However, supposing the Iron Law of Wages were
true, it would not by any means follow that general abstinence would
lead to a lower rate of wages. Non-abstemious wage-earners live
frequently in the most wretched homes, and are dressed in rags because
they spend all they can spend in drink. If they should become sober,
they would find better houses, better clothing, better furniture as
indispensable as drink is now to them. In reality abstinence, instead
of lowering wages, would probably increase them very considerably in
accordance with the increased productive power of the worker. It is a
general experience that the steady and abstemious worker commands a
higher wage than his more or less drunken, unreliable, and untidy
colleague.

Socialists are fond of excusing drunkenness by arguing that the worker
gets drunk "because he is physically and mentally exhausted, used up
with the