‘You must form new social conditions,’ said Buxton as he entered: ‘I have just left,’ he said, ‘a friend of mine. We were fellow students. He was the leader in all the classes, and graduated with high honours. He took his doctor’s degree and then became a clergyman, acquired great popularity, was the means of drawing together a large congregation, became one of the ornaments of the temperance platform, was for awhile a power in Exeter Hall, had everything that heart could wish, a charming wife, a comfortable income, a large family; and now he has become a sot and a drunkard, and I see no hope for him as long as he lives. I can only believe that he was born with a hereditary taint—and that after fighting against it all his life, it has broken out at last and proved his master.’ ‘Then you think drunkenness is a disease, and that a man is not responsible for it?’ ‘In many cases I do, and I smile when I hear the parson denounce him as guilty of a heinous sin, or the judge brand him as a criminal offender. Examine the drunkard’s body after death, and you see in the stomach, in the liver, in the heart and brain signs of a diseased condition. At the same time, I am ready to admit that there are many who drink out of mere cussedness or who are so wretched that they take to it for temporary relief; or who just drink because they live in a drunken set, and like to do as others around them do. Whatever the immorality, the vice, or the sin of drunkenness, in a very large number of cases the drunkard is more to be pitied than blamed, as the subject of disease. If you get him to take the pledge, the chances are that he will break it, and that the last state of that man will be worse than the first.’ ‘Ah! that helps me to what I have been long thinking of,’ replied Wentworth. ‘What is that—a community planted where no drink can be had? That is all very well; but while you are about it, you may as well go a step further. There are other hereditary diseases besides drunkenness: why permit them? Man is an animal,’ said Buxton. ‘I am, of course, speaking only from a medical point of view. What do we do with animals? Why, we stamp out the disease, and thus we get a new generation. It is thus we battle with lung disease in bullocks, swine fever and glandered horses. We must stamp out disease in men and women as we stamp it out of other animals.’ ‘And then pay compensation to the owner. That would be rather a costly matter.’