The majority of modern people, of course, will
probably agree with it in so far as it declares that alcoholic drinks
are often of supreme value in emergencies of illness; but many people, I
fear, will open their eyes at the emphatic terms in which they describe
such drink as considered as a beverage; but they are not content with
declaring that the drink is in moderation harmless: they distinctly
declare that it is in moderation beneficial. But I fancy that, in saying
this, the doctors had in mind a truth that runs somewhat counter to the
common opinion. I fancy that 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.
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