Eugenics would throw every possible safeguard around motherhood, especially in the period immediately before and after the birth of the child. The mother, even the expectant mother, “is doing our business, indispensable and exacting business, and we must take care of her accordingly. She is not only a worker but the foremost of all workers.”[XIX-14] Eugenic thought as represented in the writings of C. W. Saleeby has denominated alcohol, venereal disease, and tuberculosis as “racial poisons.” While there is some doubt regarding the eugenic effects of taking small amounts of alcohol into the human body, eugenists are agreed that alcohol, when taken in excess quantities, affects the germ-plasm and produces a neurotic taint. It appears that alcoholism may be a cause in producing defective children. The verdicts of hygiene and economics that alcoholism is injurious to the race is supported by eugenics. Venereal disease, another so-called racial poison, produces toxins which apparently affect the germ-plasm indirectly if not directly. It lowers the physical and moral tone and causes unfavorable racial tendencies. Venereal disease tends to destroy the generative organs and to cut off the birth rate entirely. It is a result of sex immorality which in itself tends to produce children under such abnormal conditions of vice that it becomes an anti-social, if not a dysgenic factor, in society. To the extent of course, that venereal disease kills off the racially useless, it may be considered eugenic.[XIX-15] Such a point of view, however, fails to rate properly the invasions which venereal disease is continually making upon normal and superior types of germ-plasm. Tuberculosis weakens the membranous tissues and probably leads in a few generations to an unusual degree of susceptibility to the invasion of tubercle bacilli. It is still a question, however, to what extent tuberculosis may be counted a racial poison. Professor Hobhouse has argued that, by the development of scientific hygiene, it will be possible to center attention not upon eliminating a tubercular stock but upon eliminating the tubercle bacilli.[XIX-16]