The Drink Question

[The following original but incomplete typescript comes from the files of Dan H. Laurence, who dates it around 1919 or 1920, when Shaw was sixty-three years old. The typescript contains some corrections in Shaw's hand. There is no evidence that he published the piece. One can speculate that American prohibition, sent to the states by Congress in December 1919 and ratified by January 1920, motivated Shaw to write about the issue of drink.]

The tragedy to legislation is that it has to accept and apply brutally simple solutions of extremely complicated problems. Hamlet's problem "To be or not to be"? is an only slightly more generalized form of "to drink or not to drink?"; and Hamlet's answer, though it had Shakespear's brains at the back of it might have been given by a curate with comparatively no brains at all.

To drink or not to drink? What is the question.
Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take drams against a sea of troubles
And, by just drinking, drown them. Just to get
Blind drunk, and in that drunkenness forget
The heart ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time
Th' oppressors wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit from the unworthy takes
When he himself might chloroform them all
With alcohol. There's the regard
That makes intemperance of so long life
And puts a cherished frined [friend?] into our mouths
To steal away our pain. For who would bear
The misery of the morning's racking head
The wife's contempt, the children's mute reproach
But for that dread of facing real life,
The [dreadful] disillusioned country [that awaits the traveler] to whose bourne
[The moment he is sober] No traveler returns.
Thus misery makes cowards of us all;
And enterprises of great pith and moment
Are made endurable to men by drink
In this regard their manhood turn a-wry
Losing the name of slavery.

There is much more actuality in this paraphrase than in the original soliloquy; for the prospect of life beyond the grave is at least as much an incentive to suicide as a deterrent, and has no effect on the very large number of people who nowadays do not believe in it, whereas there can be no question that drink and drugs attract us by their power of giving us an artificial happiness. The Germans call a drunken man selig; and we talk of the bowl as the grave of sorrows. To the sufferer from grief, worry, and fear, drink is an anaesthetic. To the man in acute pain morphia brings bliss. The contrast between life under the influence of cocaine and life on its normal pitch makes the latter intolerable.

Therefore if it is desired to win men from alcohol, their life must be made bearable without it. Otherwise prohibition will only end in the substitution of some other and possibly worse drug, about which no one will dare to tell the truth. For example, tea. I have seen an Australian lady who had to have a cup of tea every half hour to save her from suicidal depression. She was much more pitiable than another person I knew who was called a drunken cook because every six weeks or so she got gloriously drunk, and only kept her situations because she cooked so well when she was sober. When I spend the night in a friend's house I have to explain carefully that I do not require a cup of tea in bed at half past seven in the morning; and people ask me how I manage to do without it! This custom as grown up in my lifetime, and...