Note 198 — Chapter III

There are persons who maintain the thesis that poverty is not the principal cause of alcoholism among the working classes. As a proof they say that the laborers who earn the least (farm hands among others) are not those who drink the most, and that an increase in wages often brings about a higher consumption of alcohol. They are deceived, however. They lose sight of the fact that most agricultural laborers earn so little that they cannot consume alcohol regularly, that beside the material poverty there is an intellectual poverty, and that a slight amelioration of the one does not produce simultaneously a diminution of the other. The abuse of alcohol has, on the contrary, decreased regularly everywhere that the labor movement has brought about a continuous amelioration of material and intellectual conditions.198