The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions; Or, Joints in Our Social Armour

In an era drowning in temperance pamphlets and moralizing statistics, James Runciman does something radical: he tells the truth. This late-Victorian treatise on alcohol and society refuses the easy answers of legislative action and pious lecturing. Instead, Runciman turns to the thing most reformers lacked: genuine human feeling. Through vivid personal anecdotes and unflinching imagery, he paints the wreckage alcohol wrecks on individual lives and the families caught in the wreckage. He argues that you cannot statistics your way to compassion, that no law can address what a father's drinking does to a child left waiting in the dark. Runciman's joints in our social armour are the places where society refuses to look: the gin palaces, the back rooms, the quiet desperation of those already lost. This is not a book about drinking. It is a book about what we owe each other, and how rarely we pay.