day's work";[865] "because the wretched social condition of
the mass of workers of this country--the long hours, the uncertainty
of work, the insufficient food and clothing, and degrading home-life,
which are their daily portion--makes drunkards."[866] Another
well-known writer states: "If thousands of the workers drink to drown
the cares and sorrows of their dreary, degraded, wretched existence,
they do so at the expense of going without some of the merest
necessaries."[867] This is, unfortunately, only too true. But it is
not true that "Our damnable, infernal, profit-mongering system
manufactures and produces drunkards because huge profits can be made
out of the business for the brewer and the publican."[868]

The above statements, which excuse drunkenness as something natural
and unavoidable in Great Britain, are untrue. All civilised countries
are based upon the private possession of capital, and in all large
profits can be made by brewers and publicans. Now, if it were true, as
has been stated in the foregoing, that hard work and long hours cause
drunkenness, drunkenness should be greater in the United States,
Germany, and France than in Great Britain, for in these countries and
most others workers work much harder and work much longer hours than
in Great Britain. The British nation should therefore be the most
sober nation, but it is in reality the most drunken nation, a fact
which is known to all who have studied this question.

The majority of British Socialist leaders apparently desire to keep
the workers drunken, for every suggestion that the worker might
improve his position by greater moderation in drinking is passionately
denounced by them. In a speech Andrew Carnegie mentioned that "he had
employed forty-five thousand men at one time, and his experience was
that the man who drank was good for drinking and for nothing else. He
had nothing to do with the man who drank. He did not believe in the
Submerged Tenth, but what he wanted to do, remembering he was a
working man himself, was to take an honest, sober, well-doing,
hard-working man by the hand and help him if he could. He only wanted
to help those who could help themselves." Commenting on this speech,
one of the Socialist weeklies said: "According to the foregoing, no
drunkard, no matter how chronic, could display a greater specimen of
human demoralisation than does that reported speech of Dr. Andrew
Carnegie depict himself; soulless beyond imagination