Life & Wisdom Quote by Catherine Helen Spence

A quiet sentence like this smuggles in an entire social order. Spence isn’t describing men’s drinking so much as she’s diagramming the moral math of her time: male indulgence is default, public, and socially buffered. The only line that triggers shame is “excessive” - a slippery standard that conveniently leaves ordinary, habitual consumption untouched. Respectability doesn’t demand sobriety; it demands self-control, or at least the appearance of it.

The phrasing “were not in any way disgraceful” is doing political work. Disgrace is a social penalty, not a private feeling, and Spence’s point is that the penalty system is rigged. Men can drink and remain intact citizens unless they tip into visible dysfunction. The unstated counterpart is women, for whom even modest drinking often carried stigma, and for whom “excess” was a faster, harsher verdict. Spence’s calm tone reads like reportage, but it’s also a critique of gendered permission: men get a wide corridor of acceptable vice.

Context matters: Spence wrote in a century where temperance campaigns were also arguments about power - who got to be in public life, who got to vote, who was trusted with money and children. By anchoring shame only to “excess,” society protects male conviviality (and male networks) while treating harm as an individual failure rather than a cultural practice. The sentence exposes how norms launder behavior into tradition: if it’s prevalent, it’s presumed legitimate, until it becomes too ugly to ignore.