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Title: The Fiddlers - Drink in the Witness Box
Author: Mee, Arthur
Language: English
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THE FIDDLERS
Drink in the Witness Box
by
ARTHUR MEE
_If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and
those that are ready to be slain;
If thou sayest, “Behold, we knew it not;” doth not he that
pondereth the heart consider it?
And shall not He render to every man according to his works?_
Published by Morgan & Scott, Ltd
12 Paternoster Buildings, London, E. C. 4
First Hundred Thousand May 15, 1917
Second Hundred Thousand June 1, 1917
Reprinted in the United States by
The American Issue Publishing Company
Westerville, Ohio
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration:
DRINK LEADING FAMINE IN
The Drink Trade gave Germany her greatest weapon in the war by helping
to make the bread famine.
It was the wilful destruction of 4,800,000 tons of food, depriving the
nation of her reserves, that led to the appalling gravity of the
submarine menace.]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration:
Drink, What did You do in the Great War?
This impressive picture of Britannia is from
the splendid 1916 issue of Bibby’s Annual]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration:
THE ALLIES AND PROHIBITION—STOPPING DRINK TO WIN THE WAR
The Drink Map before the War and on the 1000th day of the War
CANADA—Prohibition almost from Sea to Sea
FRANCE—Total Prohibition of Absinthe
RUSSIA—Prohibition Everywhere
BRITAIN—120,000 Drink shops open daily]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Wages of Sin
The time has come when it should be said that those responsible for our
country now stand on the very threshold of eternal glory or eternal
shame. They play and palter with the greatest enemy force outside
Berlin. The news from Vimy Ridge comes to a land whose rulers quail
before a foe within the gate.
Not for one hour has the full strength of Britain been turned against
her enemies. From the first day of the war, while our mighty Allies have
been striking down this foe within their gates, Britain has let this
trade stalk through her streets, serving the Kaiser’s purposes, and
paying the Government £1,000,000 a week for the right to do it.
She has let this trade destroy our food and bring us to the verge of
famine; she has let it keep back guns and shells and hold up ships; she
has let it waste our people’s wealth in hundreds of millions of pounds;
she has let it put its callous brake on the merciful Red Cross; she has
let it jeopardize the unity and safety of the Empire—for it may yet be
found, as Dr. Stuart Holden has so finely said, that the links that bind
the Pax Britannica are solvable in that great chemist’s solvent,
alcohol.
The witnesses are too great to number; we can only call a few. There is
no room for all those witnesses whose evidence is in the House of
Commons Return 220 (1915), showing the part drink played in the great
shell famine, in delaying ships and guns, and imperiling the Army and
the Fleet.
But the indictment is heavy. I charge this trade with the crime the King
laid at its door two years ago, the crime of prolonging the war; and the
witnesses are here at the bar of the people. The verdict is with them,
and the judgment is with those who rule.
_The wages of sin is death: What are the wages of those who fail in an
hour like this?_
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fiddling to Disaster
We are not going to lose the war through the submarines if we all
behave like reasonable human beings who want to save their country
from disaster, privation and distress.
_The Prime Minister_
_What are we to say of a Government that plays with war and drink and
famine while these brave words are ringing in our ears?_
If the situation is so desperate that we must all go short of food, it
is desperate enough for the Government to be in earnest. But what are
the plain facts? No reasonable man who knows them can say that the
Government is in earnest.
It is not denied by anybody who knows the facts that drink has been the
greatest hindrance of the war. There is not a doubt that it has
prolonged the war for months and cost us countless lives. It is the duty
of the Government to face a dangerous thing like this; it is its duty to
pursue the war with a single eye to the speediest possible victory. But
the records of our war Governments in dealing with drink have been
records of fiddling and failure, and we stand in the third year of the
war with a Government fiddling still.
One thing will be perfectly clear if disaster and famine come. It will
be known to all the world that the Government knew the facts in time to
save us. We are in the war because we would not listen in times of
peace. We are in the third year of the war because we would not listen
in the first. We are faced with famine because we would not listen in
times of plenty, when drink was breaking down our food reserves. And we
are drifting now, nearer to disaster every day, because the Government
surrenders to the enemy worse than Germany.
It does not matter where you look, or when; the evidence of the fiddling
is everywhere about you. Take the week before the Prime Minister’s grave
speech about submarines—ending May 19.
_Submarines destroyed 27 British cargoes, mostly over 1600 tons._
=Brewers destroyed 27 British food cargoes, totaling 9000 tons.=
_The granaries of Canada were crammed with wheat waiting for British
ships, but there were no ships to bring this people’s food._
=The rum quay at London Docks was crammed with casks of rum to last
till 1920, but a ship arrived with 1000 Casks more.=
_A woman was fined £5 for destroying a quartern loaf._
=Brewers were fined nothing for destroying millions of loaves.=
_Poor people waited in queues to buy sugar in London._
=Cartloads of sugar were destroyed in London breweries.=
And so we might go on, looking on this picture and on that till the mind
almost reels with the solemn farce. The Prime Minister has suggested
that the farce does not end because those who demand its end cannot make
up their mind. It is the Government that cannot make up its mind.
It tells Parliament that no more rum is to be imported, and goes on
importing rum for years ahead.
It forbids the use of spirits less than three years old, and reduces
the three years to 18 months.
It restricts beer to 10,000,000 barrels, and tells us one day that
it is all-inclusive, and the next day that the Army Council can
order as much extra beer as it likes.
It issues a report saying that hops are not food, and gives up
hundreds of thousands of feet to shipping them; 23,000 cubic feet
the other week.
It tells us that not an inch of shipping is wasted, and wastes
shipping on bringing brewers’ vats from America and taking gin to
Africa.
It tells us that the Drink Trade gave up its distilleries
patriotically, and leaves us to discover that it was made the
subject of a bargain by which bread was being destroyed for whisky
as late as May this year.
It is quite clear that the Government is desperately in need of a
scapegoat, and desperately in need of a defense. Prohibition Russia is
not mightily impressed with our drinking; serious Canadians are asking
how long they are to sacrifice their manhood to our brewers; America is
asking already why she should go short of bread in order that England
may drink more beer.
A Government must clearly say something in view of these things, and it
has put its defense in the care of one of the sanest and cleverest men
in the United Kingdom, Mr. Kennedy Jones. If Mr. Jones does not make out
a case for it, there is no case to make. What does he say?
1. _We are told that only five per cent. of malt can be mixed with flour
for bread._
All over the country this explanation is supposed to satisfy those
simple, honest people who know little about percentages but ask plain
questions at Food Economy meetings. It is preposterous nonsense. If we
have 200,000 tons of malted barley, what on earth does it matter whether
we mix it at fifty, or five, or two per cent., so long as we do mix it?
_It adds 200,000 tons to our bread in any case._ This talk of five per
cent., puzzling to people who think it means that only one-twentieth of
this malted barley can be used, is pitiful evidence, surely, of the
straits to which the Food Controller’s Defense Department is reduced.
2. _We are told that the barley destroyed for beer would give the nation
only ten days’ bread._
It would actually last us a fortnight. Drink, which has taken a quartern
loaf from every British cupboard in every week of the war, is taking
still a quartern loaf a month from every cupboard, and the desperate
appeals of Mr. Kennedy Jones will be more effective in saving crumbs
when he can tell us that he has stopped this monstrous destruction of
over 1,000 tons of grain a day.
3. _We are told that our munition workers are dependent on beer._
It is an astounding slander. However true it may be of Governments, it
is not true of our workmen. For four months the workman has been the
scapegoat of this Government in its surrender to this trade, and we are
asked at last to believe that these men who saved us from the Shell
Famine are willing to drink us into a Bread Famine. Does the Government
never pause to ask how millions of munition workers in America and
Canada and the United Kingdom manage without beer? Does nobody in the
Government know that the greatest steel furnaces in America are under
total Prohibition, and that two million American railwaymen are subject
to instant dismissal if they touch drink while on duty? Has the
Government not read its own report of the Royal Society Committee which
had this point in mind six months ago, and told us, on the highest
authority in this country, that soldiers march better and keep fitter
without alcohol; that men do more work on less energy without alcohol;
and that “the records of American industrial experience are significant
in showing a better output when no alcohol is taken by the workmen”?
4. _We are told we need this trade for yeast._
We need not bother overmuch about that. Industrial alcohol will give us
all we want, and there is no need to carry on this dangerous trade for
the sake of yeast. We do not need a single ounce of brewer’s yeast, and
we can do without distiller’s yeast as well by setting up a thousandth
part of the machinery we have set up in the last two years. Or, while we
must have yeast, we need about 30,000 tons a year for the whole United
Kingdom, and since the prohibition of hops in June last year _we have
given enough shipping to hops every fortnight to bring in enough yeast
for a year_. A Government with shipping to spare like that, with room on
its ships for mountains of hops, for enormous brewers’ vats, and for rum
for 1921, can find room for 100 tons a day of the people’s bread. It is
a monstrous perversion of the facts to suggest that we must maintain
this food-destroying trade, with all its hideous tragedy and ruin, in
order to make bread.
It cannot be said that a Government with such desperate excuses is in
earnest. We do not wonder that a great American farmers’ paper, with no
axe to grind except that it is sane and patriotic and believes in the
war, is asking plain questions as America prepares her Prohibition Army,
her Prohibition Navy, and stops the destruction of grain for drink in
order to enter the war at full strength.
Let the Food Controller, the Prime Minister, and every responsible
citizen of the United Kingdom read this—it is from the most influential
flour-milling paper in the world, the “North Western Miller,” published
in Minneapolis:
“=Since the United States will be called upon to make food sacrifices on
behalf of the Allies, it is certainly in order to call to account the
stewardship of Great Britain in regard to food supplies. Ordinarily
America would have no right to demand such an account, but Americans are
now asked to deny themselves that Britain may have sufficient.=
“=Britain has not seen fit to prohibit the use of cereals in the
manufacture of drink, notwithstanding that the world’s food supply was
obviously short. Are Americans required to forego a part of their
accustomed ration of bread in order that their British Allies can
continue to have a plentiful supply of beer and whisky? If not, then
Britain should lose no time in putting its house in order, quitting the
drink to add to the common store of food upon which the safety of all
the Allies depends.=
“=The food supply for the Allies is no longer a purely local
proposition, to be used as a football in British politics; it deeply
concerns the people of the United States, who are certainly not called
upon to deny themselves bread in order that Britain shall have drink.=”
What is the Government’s answer to this? “We owe a very considerable
debt of gratitude to the great American people for the effective
assistance they are rendering us,” says the Prime Minister. _Is this the
way we pay them back?_ It is an ugly question for our great Ally to have
to raise as she comes into the war, flinging her Prohibition Navy in to
smash the drink-made menace of the submarine. It is unthinkable that the
Government can read these bitter words unmoved, or can leave this stain
on our history in the face of all these questionings.
There is another question, too, that comes across the Atlantic. What is
the Government going to do with the soldiers of America’s Prohibition
Army, and the sailors of America’s Prohibition Navy, when they come over
here? Are they to be broken in their thousands, made useless and
degraded as thousands of men from Prohibition Canada have been, by the
enemy that traps them before they reach the war?
They are questions for the Government and the nation, and they must be
answered in the interests of the nation, and not to please the trade
that helps the Germans every day. We cannot afford to pay the appalling
price the future will demand unless our fiddlers change their tune.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Drink Trade and Our War Services
=It is not possible to measure the strain the Drink Traffic has imposed
on our war services.=
The Food Controller’s Organization, with its great offices and staffs,
would not have been needed had we saved the food destroyed by drink.
Rationing already involves 1,200 committees, and may mean 50,000
officials and 50,000,000 tickets weekly. It could all be avoided.
Prohibition would save more bread without food controlling than all the
food controlling can save without Prohibition.
The National Service, with its network of officials, its costly
advertising, its absorption of paper and printing, could all have been
avoided under Prohibition. About 200,000 men have enrolled, but
Prohibition would give us twice that man-power any day.
The strain on a host of men and women looking after soldiers’ children
neglected through drink, soldiers’ wives spending allowances on drink,
is incalculable.
The strain on war charities and the strain on the police arising from
drink are both very great.
The strain of drink on doctors, nurses, and hospitals is beyond belief.
Prohibition would set free for the Red Cross thousands who waste their
time on the great drink trail.
The strain on transport is seen in the long lines of wagons drawn by
strong horses carting beer to public-houses. This year alone the
handling of drink must equal the lifting of at least 9,000,000 tons, and
the barrels of beer would fill nearly all the railway wagons in the
kingdom. As to ships, drink materials during the war have used up 60
ships of 5,000 tons working all the time.
On Lord Milner’s estimate of 19 barrels to the truck it would require
4,500,000 railway trucks to carry the 17,000,000 tons of beer
manufactured in the United Kingdom during the war.
=It can be proved from official figures that the weight of drink-stuff
carried about since war began has been equal to the weight of solid
material carried by the Navy to all our fighting fronts.=
It is a crying shame that the strength of Britain should be destroyed
like this in such an hour as this.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The War-Work of the Food Destroyers
There are hundreds of great Food Destructors in the United Kingdom. The
man-power at their service, spread over our breweries and distilleries,
numbers hundreds of thousands of men; their capital is hundreds of
millions. This is a summary of the work they did in the first 1,000 days
of the war:
=They sacrificed 4,400,000 tons of grain and 340,000 tons of sugar,
enough to ration the whole United Kingdom with bread for 43 weeks and
sugar for 33 weeks.=
=They took from every kitchen cupboard in the land 600 pounds of bread
and 76 pounds of sugar.=
=They destroyed bread and sugar to last every child under fifteen for
every day of the war.=
=They took from our people over £512,000,000.=
=They used up labour and transport for lifting over 50,000,000 tons. By
sea they used up 60 ships of 5,000 tons; by rail their raw materials and
the finished products would make up a train long enough to reach nearly
round the world.=
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Food Now Being Destroyed for Beer
Look at the actual facts about beer alone. We will ignore distilling, as
it gives us munitions and yeast. Had the Government tried to solve the
yeast question it could have solved it easily in these three years; it
would have had no more trouble with that problem than Russia and Canada
and America have had. But as the Government is still investigating the
yeast question, we will confine our figures to beer.
=Brewers are destroying 450,000 4-lb. loaves a day.=
=This year’s food destruction for beer alone will equal five weeks’
bread rations and four weeks’ sugar rations for the whole United
Kingdom.=
=We have seven critical weeks in this summer, and this year’s
destruction of food would carry us through.=
=Beer alone is taking 10 pounds of sugar a year from every kitchen
cupboard, and an ounce of sugar a day from every soldier.=
That is what drink is doing at this moment with the shadow of famine
creeping on.
“_He who withholdeth the corn the people shall curse him._” Proverbs.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Shadow of Famine
The Government came into office with the food shortage in sight; it was
its first duty to build up the great reserve of food we might have had
now in our granaries if the drink trade had not destroyed it. We could
have laughed at submarines, for our barns would have been filled to
overflowing, and we could have lived in comfort for a year if no ship
reached us.
Let us see how much food drink has destroyed during the war. We will
take it from August 4, 1914, to April 30, 1917. It is 999 days of the
war. The grain and sugar destroyed for drink have been:
Grain 4,400,000 tons
Sugar (for beer alone) 340,000 tons
[Illustration:
How Canada sees it—A Canadian cartoon of the callous destruction of
bread for beer and whisky]
It is not easy to realize what this means, but it will help us if we
think of one or two examples.
=The biggest thing ever set up on earth is the Great Pyramid. It is
80,000,000 cubic feet. The food destroyed by drink during the war would
make two Great Pyramids, each bigger than the Pyramid of Egypt.=
=The longest British railway is the Great Western; it is over 3,000
miles, but it would not hold the food destroyed by drink since war
began. If every inch of it were crammed with wagons, the Great Western
Railway would need hundreds of miles more line to hold the train-loads
of food destroyed.=
=There are about 750,000 railway wagons in the United Kingdom, but if
the Drink Trade had them all they would not hold the food it has
destroyed.=
=There are about 30,000 engines on our British railways, and if the food
destroyed were made up in trains of 125 tons apiece, all our engines
would not pull them; we should still want 10,000 more.=
So vast is this incredible quantity of food destroyed by an enemy trade
while famine has been coming on. We should have saved it all if
Parliament had followed the King, and it would have given the whole
United Kingdom its flour rations for nearly a year. Take it at its
minimum scientific human food value, and on the basis of our rations in
May, 1917, it would have given us:
Flour for the whole United Kingdom 43 weeks
Sugar for the whole United Kingdom 33 weeks
Our three war Governments, confronted with the increasing certainty of
at least a three-years’ war, have allowed the Drink Trade to destroy
this vast reserve of food.
The full toll of this trade upon our scanty food supply, growing shorter
and shorter while the queues outside our food shops grow longer and
longer, is staggering indeed, even now with drink about three-quarters
stopped. We must remember that it makes no difference that the barley
has been malted; it is still good human food, and every ounce of it
should be mixed with grain for making bread. Let us remember, also, that
_brewer’s sugar is a good pure sugar_, the objection to it being largely
the objection most of us have to standard bread—its colour. Malt or
sugar, every ounce a brewer destroys is food stolen from the people. Let
us take expert opinion on the subject.
The Food Value of Brewer’s Sugar
We do not, of course, use this dark sugar when white sugar is cheap
and easily procurable, but during the war we have used it for
coffee, cocoa, and tea; and for puddings where colour did not
matter. We have used it a good deal in our bakeries for chocolate
goods, where colour again does not matter. It is a good, pure sugar,
and the colour is the principal drawback.
_Letter to Arthur Mee from a London caterer_
The Food Value of Brewer’s Malt
Malt flour can be used to make excellent cake with 50 per cent.
wheat flour. It is sweet and pleasant to taste without the need of
any sugar. Good scones can be made with 25 per cent. of malt flour.
Its use in bread made with yeast causes too much fermentation in the
bread, but it has no effect on baking-powder. The Food Controller’s
Department is aware of the practicability of using malt flour, but
the sale is restricted in order to limit its use for making beer.
Brewers and maltsters are too patriotic to wish to use for beer what
could be applied to food in case of a serious shortage, and the
large stocks of barley and malt can supplement the supply of wheat
flour.
_Letter from a Brewer in the “Times,” April 11, 1917_
Yet we have seen our Government holding up sugar for brewers; we have
seen our Food Controller refuse to release a caterer’s sugar unless it
were sold to a brewer; we have seen a Government short of food-ships
bringing in brewers’ vats and casks of rum; and we see the Government
still holding up this malt that would feed a people asking for more
bread.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Tunes They Play
Strange tunes we hear the fiddlers play, but their music does not charm
away the troubles of a famine-threatened land. From morning till night
the prayer of the people rises, “Give us this day our daily bread,” but
the heart of Downing Street is hardened, and the nation’s bread goes day
by day to the destroyer.
But all the time we see the measure of the courage of our rulers on the
hoardings in the streets. We know their posters by heart.
_Defeat the enemy’s attempt to starve you_, by—not by stopping the
destruction of food, but by joining the National Service, and probably
helping to pick hops. There was a man in a co-operative store who
volunteered for National Service, and last month he received
instructions _to leave the grocery store and take up duty in a brewery_.
_Sow your window-boxes and plant your back gardens_—and Mr. Prothero
will see that the soil of a million back gardens is wasted on hops.
_We have not enough food to last till the harvest_—why not go out and
catch rabbits, asks Lord Devonport—and sit and wait for sparrows?
_We must save every pound of bread we can to get over our critical
weeks_—not by saving the quartern loaf that beer is taking every month
from every British cupboard now, but by going hungry so that drinkers
may not thirst.
_We must not eat more than our share, on our honour_—but the man across
the table can eat his share of bread and drink somebody else’s too.
_We must eat less and eat slowly_—so that brewers may waste more and
waste quickly.
_We must keep back famine_—but not by using malt, says Captain Bathurst:
that would cost three times as much as letting famine come. _But why not
keep the malt till bread is as dear as gold?_
_Let all heads of households abstain from using grain except in bread_,
says the King’s Proclamation. But let the brewers waste 8,000 tons a day
for beer, says the Government.
_God speed the plough and the woman who drives it_—yes, and God help the
woman who drives the plough to feed the brewer while her little ones cry
for bread.
_Let us fine £5 whoever wastes a loaf_, says the Food Controller—but
not, of course, the brewers who waste 450,000 quartern loaves a day.
Hops are no use as food to anybody, says the Board of Trade Scientific
Committee. “_Then let us grow only half as many_,” said Mr. Prothero.
Mr. Lloyd George says Mr. Prothero is working “in a continuous rattle of
mocking laughter and gibes.” Yes, it is the mocking laughter of a nation
that is not really amused by sights like this. The nation does not like
to see the bread rations of 70,000 men in France cut down while the
Drink Trade is destroying every week bread enough to last these men a
year. It does not like to see the Government sending letters out to
managers of factory canteens, begging them to be careful of bread, while
food flows through our beer canteens like a river running to waste. It
does not like to see Y. M. C. A. canteens denied supplies of sugar while
barrels of beer are stacked in great piles outside. It does not like the
calling up of discharged soldiers while thousands of strong men are
working hard all day destroying food or carting beer about the streets;
and it does net like the tragic comedies of Captain Bathurst, who warns
us that it really may become necessary in the national interest—and
then, perhaps, he drops his voice to break it very gently—it really may
become necessary, if these cake shops are not very careful, _to
whitewash the lower part of their windows_.
Oh, these fiddlers! And now we have a new idea from the Food Control
Department; it is a coloured poster of a Union Jack and a big loaf on
it, and “Waste not, Want not,” printed in big type. It was being printed
on the day the Prime Minister told the nation that America had found it
is no use waving a neutral flag in the teeth of a shark. It is an
eloquent and true saying, but it is also true, that it is no use waving
platitudes from copybooks in the teeth of a wolf at the door. The Prime
Minister says he is taking no chances. Let us be quite sure. We once had
a Government of which men said its motto was “Wait and See.” _Are we
better off, or are we worse, with a Government that Sees and Waits?_
But there is no end to the fiddling. With Food Controllers who hold up
food for Food Destroyers; with Food Economy Handbooks that cry out loud
to save the crumbs but have no word to say about the tons we fling away;
with a Prime Minister praying for window-boxes and a Board of
Agriculture consecrating hopfields, we need not be surprised if the
nation is not mightily impressed.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
How the Allies Did It
All the world knows, except, apparently, the world that goes round at
Westminster, how Prohibition has helped the Allies.
_With the Shell Famine at its height—largely made by Drink—the
Prohibition Army on the East held up the enemy while Britain fought the
Drink Trade for her shells._
_With the Bread Famine looming in sight—largely made by Drink—the
Prohibition Navy from the West flings in her power against the
submarines._
Oh, for the spirit of our Allies in this land! If France wants to rouse
the spirit of Verdun she strikes down her foe at home and puts absinthe
away. If Russia wants to be great and free she stops this drink and
orders out the Romanoffs. If Canada wants to give her utmost help to
Britain she stops this drink from sea to sea. If Australia wants to make
her soldiers fit she trains them in her Prohibition camps. If America
wants to beat the whole world at making shells she drives drink from her
workshops. If San Francisco has an earthquake she stops drink while she
pulls herself together. If Liverpool has a dangerous strike she shuts up
public-houses and keeps the city quiet. Oh, for a Government of Britain
that will see what all the world can see!
History will do justice to the part the Prohibition policy of the Allies
has played in saving Europe, but a pamphlet has no room for these
things. We can take only one or two great witnesses to the mighty
achievements of our Prohibition Allies. Let us begin with France, and
call our own Prime Minister to tell us what they did. Mr. Lloyd George:
One afternoon we had to postpone our conference in Paris, and the
French Minister of Finance said, “I have to go to the Chamber of
Deputies, because I am proposing a bill to abolish absinthe.”
Absinthe plays the same part in France that whisky plays in this
country, and they abolished it by a majority of something like ten
to one that afternoon.
And how did Paris take this prohibition that men said would cause a
revolution? Let us ask Mr. Philip Gibbs, whose splendid letters home
have made his name a household word. Mr. Philip Gibbs:
Absinthe was banned by a thunderstroke, and Parisians who had
acquired the absinthe habit trembled in every limb at this judgment
which would reduce them to physical and moral wrecks. But the edict
was given and Paris obeyed, loyally and with resignation.
And now we come to Russia, to these mighty Russian people who in the
last year of vodka saved £6,000,000 or £7,000,000, and in the last full
year of Prohibition saved £177,000,000. We will call our own Prime
Minister again:
Russia, knowing her deficiency, knowing how unprepared she was,
said, “I must pull myself together. I am not going to be trampled
upon, unready as I am. I will use all my resources.” What is the
first thing she does? She stops drink.
I was talking to M. Bark, the Russian Minister of Finance, and I
asked, “What has been the result?” He said, “The productivity of
labour, the amount of work which is put out by the workmen, has gone
up between 30 and 50 per cent.”
I said, “How do they stand it without their liquor?” and he replied,
“Stand it? I have lost revenue over it up to £65,000,000 a year and
we certainly cannot afford it, but if I proposed to put it back
there would be a revolution in Russia.”
How completely teetotal Russia became we read long ago in the _Daily
Mail_, to which Mr. Hamilton Fyfe sent this message from Petrograd:
Try to imagine all the publichouses in the British Isles closed; all
the restaurants putting away their wine cards and offering nothing
stronger than cider or ginger ale. That is the state of things in
Russia. Strange it seems indeed, yet there is one thing stranger.
Nobody makes any audible complaint.
Everywhere in Russia it was the same: a nation was made sober by Act of
Parliament.
“Without a murmur of protest,” said the Moscow correspondent of the
_Times_, “the most drunken city in Europe was transformed into a
temple of sobriety, and we felt that if Russia could thus conquer
herself in a night, there was indeed nothing that might not be
accomplished.” And two years later, when the revolution came, we
read in the _Times_ this note from Odessa: “Perfect tranquillity
continues to prevail here, although for the moment Odessa is
practically without police. The satisfactory absence of crime may
largely be attributed to the sealing up of spirituous liquors.”
We need not be afraid of Drinkless Revolutions.
But the truth about Russia is almost too incredible to believe, for it
is Prohibition that made the revolution possible; it was stopping drink
that set 170,000,000 people free. We will let a business correspondent
of the _Times_ give evidence; here is what he said on April 21, 1917:
In one respect it must be said that the Reactionaries saw clearly.
They always claimed that the Tsar had ruined himself by decreeing
the abolition of vodka. None but a sober people could have carried
out the Russian Revolution.
The police were, on the other hand, the victims of drink. They had
seized the vodka at the order of the Government, and had kept
plentiful supplies for themselves. Thus the Revolution was in part a
struggle between drunken reaction and sober citizens. Sobriety
triumphed.
The Russian people will not bow down and tie their hands to the thrones
of Europe: do we wonder if they scorn our quailing before this trade?
Free Russia flings off the dynastic yoke: do we wonder Prohibition
Russia is not much impressed by a nation with a Drink Trade round its
neck?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Soldier’s Home
The things that will be told against this trade when all the truth is
known will break the heart of those who read. It is well for us that we
cannot know the full truth now; the burden would be too grievous to be
borne in days like these. But if you will go into your street, or will
talk of these things with the next man you meet from one of our pitiful
slums, or will pick up one of those local papers that still have space
to print the truth, you will find the evidence close about you.
We are the guardians of our soldiers’ homes; we are the trustees of the
hope and happiness of their little children; but we let this drink
trade, that takes our people’s food out of their cupboards, turn that
food into the means of death, and sow ruin and destruction through the
land.
But we will call the witnesses to these drink-ruined soldiers’ homes,
these homes that the enemy worse than Germany has shattered and broken
while our men have been fighting for your home and mine. We will call a
few here and there, knowing that for every one called are hundreds more
that can be called, and that beyond all these that are known there is in
this little land a countless host of tragedies as secret as the grave.
A Tooting soldier whose wife had sent him loving letters to the
trenches came back to surprise her after 18 months. He found another
man in possession of his home and a new baby; and, overcome by the
discovery, he gave way to drink and killed himself.
_Records of Balham Coroner, March 1916_
A soldier who had left a comfortable home behind returned from the
Front to find it ruined, with not a bed to lie on, his children
never sent to school, his wife all the time in publichouses. “I wish
I had been shot in the trenches,” he said when he arrived.
_Facts in “Cork Constitution,” December 10, 1915_
Outside a publichouse in Liverpool a man was dragging home his
drunken wife, the mother of eleven children. They rolled over and
over on the ground, the drunken women violently resisting the
maddened man. Then came up the eldest son, home from the Front, with
five wounds in his body.
_Facts in “Liverpool Post,” March 2, 1917_
A soldier came back to his home in London to find his wife drinking
his money away, harbouring another man; one of his children cruelly
neglected and the other in its grave, perished from neglect; and a
drunken carman’s baby about to be born in his home.
_Facts in Shaftesbury Society Report_
A Lance-Corporal heard in the trenches of his wife’s misconduct. His
commanding officer wrote to make inquiries, and the soldier wrote to
the Chief Constable a pitiful letter: “What have I to look forward
to at the end of the war?” he said. “Nothing, only sorrow. I never
get a letter to know how my loving son is getting on; I think it
will drive me mad.”
He came home, opened the door of his house, threw his kit on the
floor, and declared that he would kill his wife. He put a razor on
the table, and his little boy hid it in a cupboard, but a week later
this boy of 12 went home and found his father and mother lying on
the floor, the father drunk, the mother dead. The soldier, drowning
his misery in drink, had strangled his wife. Rousing himself beside
her, he said, as the police found them, “Kiss me, Sally. Aye, but
tha are poorly.”
He had been the best of fathers, said the little boy; the best of
soldiers, said his commanding officer; and the judge declared that
such a man, with such a character, ought not to be with criminals.
_Record of Huddersfield Assizes, Autumn 1916_
A soldier asked a London magistrate if he could draw the allowance
instead of his wife, who was in prison for drunkenness and was
neglecting his four children. The magistrate said the only thing was
to send the children to the workhouse.
The Soldier: “So I am to be a soldier for my King and country while
my children go to the workhouse?” The Magistrate: “That is so,
because you have a drunken wife. I am sorry for you.”
_Facts in “Sunday Herald,” June 1916_
A seaman gunner, who had been torpedoed and had fought in the
trenches, arrived home to find his wife, in his own words, “filthy
drunk,” and his children utterly deplorable. He reclothed them, but
his wife pawned the clothes, though she had £7 a month. He took his
children away, but a crowd of women interfered with him, and the
police were powerless against the mob.
_Facts in “Western Daily Mercury,” July 23, 1915_
A soldier just back from the Front was found in the street weeping
bitterly on discovering that his wife was in gaol through drink, and
his child, through her neglect, had been burned.
_Statement by Marchioness of Waterford_
A soldier came home from the Front to find that drink had ruined his
home, and his children were being cared for by Glasgow Parish
Council. “Hour after hour we sit on this council,” says the
chairman, “listening to case after case, and the cause is
drunkenness, drunkenness, drunkenness. There are 2300 children under
the council, and two thousand of them have parents living.” “Our raw
material is the finished product of the public-house,” says one of
these workers.
_Facts from Glasgow Councillors_
A motor mechanic at the Front, hearing that his wife, hitherto a
sober woman, had given way to drink, obtained leave to come home. He
found his wife, very drunk, struggling home with the help of the
railings in the street, and neighbours described her horrible life
with other soldiers. The husband obtained a separation for the sake
of his children, and went back to France.
_Full facts in “Kent Messenger,” July 31, 1915_
A young soldier came from the trenches to spend Christmas in his
home in Sheffield—a teetotal home before the war. He found that his
wife had given way to drink, had deserted one child and disappeared
with the other, and that a baby was to be born which was not his.
_Facts known to the Author_
A miner fighting at the Front came home to find his wife at a
publichouse, his home filthy, and his children cruelly neglected. He
was heartbroken. His young wife frequently left the house from
tea-time till midnight, and in order to keep the children from the
fire she had burned them severely with a piece of iron. A
respectable-looking woman, the mother pleaded for a chance, and was
led from the dock sobbing bitterly.
_Facts in “Sheffield Independent,” February 21, 1917_
A young Yorkshire miner enlisted and left his wife, hitherto sober,
with three children. She took to drink, neglected the home, and is
now a dipsomaniac, with two children not her husband’s.
_Facts known to the Author_
A soldier came home ill from France, hurried from Waterloo to his
home, and found the door locked. He knocked, and his little boy’s
voice came—“Is that you, mother, and are you drunk?” Hearing his
father’s voice the excited lad opened the door. “Where’s mother?”
asked his father. “Mother?” said the boy; “she’s drinking. She comes
home drunk night after night now and knocks the kids about. She
daren’t hit _me_; I’m fair strong, dad; but the other.... And as for
baby, she never does nothing for her. I and Freddy takes turns, but
I dunno what to give her to eat sometimes.”
Midnight passed before the mother appeared, helplessly drunk. “Did
you expect me to sit at home weeping for you?” she said. The next
morning, broken with tears, she promised to mend her ways. The
soldier went into hospital, and there he had a letter from his boy.
This is part of it:
“Dear Dad, I write to let you know mother is going on awful. She has
took all Fred and Timmy’s clothes to the pawnshop, and she hit
Selina on Saturday with the toasterfork and cut her face. She cried
all night, it hurt her so. She is drunk every night and some nights
dussent come back at all. She daren’t hit me, but I am getting
afraid about baby. We are all very hungry and miserable.”
The soldier got leave, found his wife had disappeared, and, finding
charity for his four little ones, he left his ruined home and went
back to the hospital.
_Facts in possession of the Author_
A working-man at Gravesend went to the Front, leaving behind a wife
and three children, the baby lately born. His wife started drinking
away her allowance, neglected her home, and, full of remorse and
shame for the disgrace she had brought on the man who was in the
trenches, she hanged herself. The man came home to find waiting for
him three motherless children, and one of the most pathetic letters
a man has ever had to read.
_Records of Gravesend Coroner, 1916_
Mothers and Children
It is easy to understand the pitiful appeal of 500 women out of Holloway
Prison who begged the Duchess of Bedford to help to close all
public-houses during the war. They know in their hearts of tragedies
such as these, in which mothers and children die while the fathers fight
and the Drink Trade goes on merrily.
A soldier’s wife in Sunderland drew £12 arrears of Army pay, and she
and her mother began to drink it away. She drew her pay on Friday,
was carried home drunk on Saturday, gave birth to twins on Sunday
morning, and died on Sunday night. The twins died a week or two
after, and a week or two after that the soldier came home from the
trenches to find his family in the grave.
_Facts in Sunderland papers, 1917_
Two women went drinking in Chester on a Sunday night, a soldier’s
mother and a soldier’s wife. They had five whiskies each, and fell
drunk in the street. One slept all night on a sofa, and the other
lay on the floor, shouting and swearing. Her husband propped her up
with a mat, and for hours she lay shrieking. In the morning she was
dead. The publican was fined £5.
_Facts in “Chester Chronicle,” February 17, 1917_
The wife of a Yorkshire soldier was drowned while drunk at
Sheffield. She started drinking with another soldier’s wife
disappeared with a drunken man, and her death was a mystery.
_Facts in “Sheffield Independent,” April 26, 1916_
At an inquest on the bodies of a soldier’s twin children, both dead
from chronic wasting, it was stated that the mother had 34_s._ a
week, and both she and her husband drank. The mother had had four
children in fifteen months, and all were dead.
_Records of Battersea Coroner, October 1915_
In one street in London where there were one day four convictions
for drunkenness, a woman carried a sick baby into a public house. As
she stood at the bar the little baby died, but the mother went on
drinking, with the dead child in her arms.
_Records of Charity Organisation Society_
The wife of a highly-esteemed sergeant-major fighting in France was
found lying drunk. Her four children, shockingly neglected, were put
in a home, but she took them out, went on drinking, and received
soldiers at her house. In a few weeks her husband heard in the
trenches that his wife had died from drinking.
_Records of West Surrey Coroner, March 1917_
A soldier left three children at home. He had been earning £1 a
week, but his wife received 32_s._ 6_d._ a week. She drank it away,
neglected the children, and died in an asylum while her husband was
in France.
_Records of Claybury Asylum_
The little child of a soldier in France died in Guy’s Hospital from
burns. The mother said she could not buy a fireguard. While she was
absent the baby was burned, and the mother, returning in a drunken
state carrying a can of beer, said, “A good job!”
_Records of Southwark Coroner, December 1915_
A soldier’s widow with six children, an Army pension of 30_s._ a
week, and her eldest boy’s wages of 30_s._, drinks every night with
a married man who has a respectable, clean, and sober wife with
eight children and a ninth lately born—born prematurely as a result
of her husband’s beating her. The child bore the marks of his
violence, and died in two months.
_Records of Shaftesbury Society_
The young wife of a soldier was brought from prison to be tried for
manslaughter of her baby, who had died in the infirmary from
neglect. She spent her time in the publichouses, and laughed when
the children were taken to the infirmary. She went out one day to
fetch a bottle of whisky and as she drank with a neighbour she said
she knew the baby would die. The doctor said the child’s skin was
hanging in folds on the bones.
_Facts in the “Observer,” January 23, 1916_
A soldier’s wife drank continuously while her child wasted away,
left the tiny baby alone in the house while she went for beer, and a
policeman found her lying drunk across the dead child’s body.
_Records of Barnsley Coroner, November, 1916_
The mother of two children whose father was fighting in France gave
way to drink in his absence, neglected her children and left them in
grave moral danger, and committed suicide.
_Records of an Orphan Home_
A soldier’s baby starved slowly to death as the mother drank away
his pay, and while the child lay in its coffin the mother was out
drinking.
_West Bromwich Police Records, June 1915_
A munition worker at Newcastle was grievously upset by the drinking
habits of his wife. The police left a summons for her and she
disappeared. Two days later her body was found in the Tyne. The man
broke down at the inquest, saying, between his sobs: “She was such a
good wife to me for 20 years, and reared a good family before she
took to drink.”
_Records of Newcastle Coroner, Summer 1916_
The wife of a corporation workman at Sheffield, home from the
trenches with six gunshot wounds and three pieces of shell in his
body, found that his wife had given way to drink and starved her
five children. She was sent to prison for six months.
_Police Records of Sheffield, November 3, 1915_
A soldier’s wife who had spent the greater part of £100 Army money
in drink was sent to prison for neglecting her children. Almost
everything in the house was pawned, including the children’s
clothes; and the woman began to drink at five o’clock in the
morning, and went on drinking all day.
_Facts in “Cork Constitution,” December 10, 1915_
A soldier’s wife in Monmouthshire, with £3 9_s._ a week, was found
sodden with drink, while the soldier’s eight children were in rags
starving by day and huddling up in one bed by night.
_Facts in “Westminster Gazette,” July 22, 1916_
A smart tidy woman in a London suburb, whose husband is fighting in
Mesopotamia, has £2 10_s._ 6_d._ a week. She used to love her
children and had a happy home, but she drinks away her Army pay,
lives with a married man who has six children, and has become a
drunken slattern. The other wife is beaten and neglected, and the
soldier’s children have gone to the workhouse.
_Records of Shaftesbury Society_
The four children of a soldier in Dublin were found hungry and
shivering with cold while the mother was drinking. Several times she
had let her baby fall while reeling with it in the street.
_Facts in “Dublin Evening Herald,” October 20, 1916_
At the trial of a soldier’s wife for drinking and neglecting seven
children, it was stated that a child of eleven was left in charge of
a baby a fortnight old while the mother was drinking. At night all
the children were heard screaming. The house was in utter darkness,
and there was an escape of gas. Some men went in and turned off the
gas, and at last the mother came stumbling out of a publichouse
across the road.
_Facts in “Sheffield Star,” November 25, 1915_
“Your husband is fighting for his country, and his children have the
right to be protected,” said the Chairman of the Chesterfield Bench
to a soldier’s wife. Her children were found starving while she was
drinking, and one day the little boy of three was found crouching
naked inside the fender, trying to get warm. The police described
the house as foul from top to bottom, with a heap of horrible rags
for a bed, and a food cupboard that made the house unendurable when
the door was opened.
_Facts in “Yorkshire Telegraph,” March 24, 1916_
The wife of a missing soldier was sent to prison at Chesterfield for
neglecting three children between 13 years and 16 weeks old. She had
gone astray through drink, and the youngest child, born under
terrible conditions, was not her husband’s. It was found lying on a
filthy bed, and its drunken mother, to satisfy its pangs of hunger,
had given it pennyworths of laudanum. Eleven people slept in two
foul bedrooms.
_Chesterfield Police Records, October 9, 1916_
Five hundred children of soldiers are being cared for in the great
Homes founded by Mr. Quarrier in Scotland, and most of them are
there because of drinking mothers.
_Facts in Reports_
A soldier’s wife at Biggleswade spent her allowance on drink and
left her three children locked up in the house for days at a time.
_Police Court Records of Biggleswade, September 1915_
A soldier’s wife was found reeling in the streets of Dublin with a
baby in her arms. At her home were found four other children,
cruelly neglected.
_Facts in “Dublin Mail,” August 16, 1916_
Nineteen hundred children of soldiers have come into the care of the
N.S.P.C.C., mainly through drink, since the war began.
_Records of the N.S.P.C.C._
The Ruined Wives
Who does not remember the terrible rush for the last drop of drink when
Prohibition seemed to be coming with the New Year? Long queues of women
besieged the whisky shops in Glasgow. There were women of all ages, said
the _Daily Mail_, tottering in grey hairs, young wives with babies in
their arms, and men of the loafer type. “There was not a respectable
citizen,” says the _Mail_, “who did not deplore this discreditable
scene, but the remarks of passers-by provoked only torrents of insult.”
The promise of the new year and the new Government, alas, was not
fulfilled, and now in place of Drink Queues we have Food Queues. Let us
see what drink is doing among our soldiers’ wives:
Of 3000 soldiers’ wives being cared for in South London, 2000 are
splendid, while 1000 are sinking daily to lower and lower levels
through drink.
_Records of Shaftesbury Society_
A soldier’s wife, with a separation allowance of 32_s._ 6_d._ a
week, drank most of it away, ruined her home, neglected her
children, and became a lunatic.
_Records of Claybury Asylum_
A young soldier’s wife, hitherto “quite an elegant type,” is rapidly
becoming a drunkard. Women hitherto sober have not the courage to
keep from women’s drinking parties, and young girls come out of
factories and go to publichouses in little groups.
_Records of Charity Organisation Society_
Outside a public house in Dublin 15 small children were crying in
the cold, waiting for their mothers. Ninety-four drunken women came
out in 25 minutes. There were ten drunken soldiers, and two girls of
15 were thrown into the street hopelessly drunk.
_Facts in “Irish Times,” April 20, 1915_
In Dundee over 170 wives of soldiers gave way to drink last year,
and cruelly neglected their homes.
_Records of the N. S. P. C. C._
A soldier in the trenches received a letter from his little boy,
which he sent to London with a pitiful appeal for help.
“Kindly do what you can for me and the well-being and welfare of my
four beautiful children,” the poor soldier wrote. “I am enclosing a
fearful letter I have received from my poor little lad, 14-1/2, the
first and only letter I have received from him. Sir, I shall be most
anxiously awaiting your reply, for this letter is the greatest blow
I have ever received.”
This is the little boy’s letter:
Dear Dad: Just a line to let you know how everything is at home.
Mother is drunk for a fortnight and sober for a week for months
and months. I’ve stuck it now for seven months, and can’t stick
it any longer. I tried to get into the Navy and passed all the
tests, but mother would not sign the papers, for which I am
sorry. If mum would sign I could go away to Portsmouth on
Thursday, but she will not. At the present moment she is half
drunk and keeps jawing me so that I could knife meself. I’ve
lost my new job because mum would not wake me in the morning,
and nothing for breakfast, and had to get mine and the
children’s tea at tea-time. It pains me to write like this, but
I can’t help it. I now seek your advice as to what to do. I hope
_you_ will enjoy Xmas, although there is not much hope for us. I
now conclude with fondest love, X. Your heartbroken Son, Leslie.
A stream of nearly 15,000 men and women poured into 58 publichouses
in Birmingham in less than four hours; over 6,000 were women. Into
one house the people streamed at nearly 500 an hour.
_Facts in “Review of Reviews,” October 1915_
For months some wives of soldiers and sailors in Scotland were never
really sober. “We have done our best,” says a worker among them,
“going to their homes and doing all in our power, but it beats us.”
In 23 families, with 178 children born, 61 were dead.
_Facts told to Secretary for Scotland, July 1916_
Will some Member of Parliament please ask
=whether the ships that have brought in food for destruction by the
drink trade could not have brought in a large proportion of the
3,500,000 tons of wheat now waiting for ships in Australia and the
2,000,000 tons waiting in Canada?=
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Roll of the Dead
No more pitiful record of the war is there than that unnumbered roll of
men lured from our armies by this liquor trade, and cast into
dishonoured graves. We can take only a few of them.
A number of soldiers at Ormskirk came into camp drunk on Christmas
night. A request for quiet led to a fight, and one of the men was
struck two blows and was dead the next morning.
_Facts in “Daily Mail,” December 28, 1915_
A Liverpool soldier, drinking continuously, had overstayed his
leave, and in a quarrel about this he stabbed his brother dead.
_Facts in “Liverpool Courier,” April 20, 1917_
A soldier invalided from France, having recovered from his wounds,
gave way to drink, assaulted an officer, and hanged himself in his
prison cell.
_Facts in “Daily News,” April 11, 1916_
A young lieutenant shot himself in an hotel near Trafalgar Square,
and among the documents read at the inquest was a letter striking
him off his battalion for drinking and gross carelessness.
_Facts in “Daily Chronicle,” October 27, 1916_
A captain in the Army ruined by drink, with a fine record of
military service, started drinking on his way to a shooting range in
London, and in a struggle he shot a detective dead.
_Facts in “Daily News,” September 20, 1915_
In the Scottish Express, between Doncaster and Selby, a drunken
corporal of the Coldstream Guards was showing his rifle to a friend
when it went off, the bullet killing a munitions works director in
the next compartment, and narrowly escaping a lady in the
compartment beyond. The corporal had in his pocket a bottle of
whisky, which was freely handed round.
_Facts in “Daily News,” December 3, 1915_
A soldier who had been drinking heavily was placed in the guard
room, and died after a night of groaning, evidently as the result of
a fall.
_Records of Greenwich Coroner, January 1, 1915_
A young soldier arriving from India on Christmas morning was
arrested three days later, after a drunken fight in which a man was
killed.
_Westminster Police Records, December 28, 1914_
A soldier spent a day’s leave in Manchester, ate and drank very
heavily, and was found dead the next morning from choking.
_Records of Manchester Coroner, December 28, 1914_
A soldier home on leave was found drunk with his wife. They had been
throwing pots at one another, and on Christmas morning the woman was
found dead with a wound in her head.
_Records of Oldham Coroner, December 24, 1914_
Three gunners had four drinks each of rum, and at midnight lay down
to sleep in a garden at Lee, where one was found dying from alcohol.
_Facts in Local Papers at Lee, June 1915_
A soldier died from alcohol in a house where drink was unlawfully
sold.
_Facts in “Manchester Guardian,” April 8, 1915_
A private in the Welsh Fusiliers died from alcohol, cold and
exposure. He left a publichouse with a 4_s._ bottle of whisky, and
was found dead on the roadside next morning, with the bottle almost
empty.
_Facts in “Daily News,” April 13, 1915_
An old man who was said to be in a drunken condition was wounded in
a fall with a soldier from Gallipoli, and died a few days after.
_Facts in “Daily Mail,” January 17, 1916_
An elderly man, seeing a drunken soldier lying in the street, went
to his assistance, and was killed in a disturbance that followed.
_Record of Yorkshire Assizes, November 21, 1916_
A soldier was found drowned in the Trent. He was described as a good
man at his work, but not steady, and had been drinking.
_Facts in “Newark Advertiser,” August 4, 1915_
A terrible disturbance occurred in a camp at Portland Reservoir
after the closing of the canteen one Sunday night. A large number of
men who had been drinking created a disturbance, in which bricks and
stones were used, a tent collapsed, and the officers were called to
quell the riot. The captain, drawing his revolver, rushed with two
lieutenants into a hut where men were shouting and struggling, but
appeals had no effect—the men “did not appear to hear or recognize
their officers,” and one man raised his rifle and took aim at them.
At least fifty shots were fired, and a young corporal fired many
shots through the window into the darkness. In the morning a soldier
was found dead. Nobody knew who shot him, but the corporal thought
he must have done.
_Records of Dorset Assizes, Spring 1915_
Will some Member of Parliament please ask
=whether it is true that more food is being destroyed each week in
breweries and distilleries than by submarines?=
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The New Drinkers
“_No complaints have reached the War Office of youths who were total
abstainers having become confirmed drunkards since enlistment._”
So we are told in the House of Commons. The records of the War Office
are clearly incomplete, and the information from the camps may here be
supplemented by unchallengeable witnesses of what happens in the
horrible drink canteens run by the Army Council.
A soldier who was wounded at La Bassée, a total abstainer until
then, was sentenced at the Old Bailey for killing his uncle while
drunk. He was a newsvendor, aged 21, and had no memory of the
tragedy in which he killed his uncle at a Christmas party.
_Facts in “Daily Chronicle,” January 13, 1916_
A private in the Royal Scots Fusileers, aged 17, was charged with
murdering a bugler boy, aged 16, in his regiment. The private became
mad drunk in the camp canteen, went back to his hut, locked himself
in and fired two shots, one of which entered another hut and killed
the bugler. “Was there no one with power to say how much drink
should be given?” asked the judge, and an officer said there was no
one. “Then it was high time power was given to the commanding
officer,” said the judge. “Was there to be no restraining hand to
prevent young boys from fuddling themselves in canteens?”
_Facts in the “Times,” November 21, 1916_
An old man sat in a tram in great distress. He had lost his boy at
the Front. When he joined the Army he had never tasted alcohol, but
when he came home on leave to see his mother he was drunk every
night. He was drunk the night he went away, and in three days he was
dead. “The last we saw of him,” said the poor old man between his
sobs, “was his going away drunk, and his mother, who is
old-fashioned in her faith, cannot get it out of her mind that no
drunkard can enter the Kingdom of God.”
_Facts told by Dr. Norman Maclean_
Many young officers, called upon to share the wine bill at mess,
naturally say, “If I have to pay I may as well drink my share,” and
one man accounted for ten glasses of champagne. On a Guest night in
his mess several more “were under the table.”
_Facts in “Dublin Daily Express,” April 1916._
A boy got his V.C., and came home wounded. The publican in his
street sounded his praises in the taproom, where they subscribed to
the bar for 120 pints for him when he arrived. He came home and
began to drink it, and was nearly dead with it before he was
rescued.
_Facts related by Bishop of Lincoln_
When the Scottish Horse Brigade were at Perth whisky was literally
forced down the men, and they were inundated with floods of bad
women.
_Brigadier-General Lord Tullibardine_
A teetotal household had two boys in an officers’ training camp, and
they gave pitiable accounts of drinking. Boys from school had a
drunken sergeant put over them, and a canteen in the midst of them.
“Our boys never saw drink before,” one father wrote.
_From a letter to Dr. Norman Maclean_
A boy of 17, discharged from the Navy, spent 8_s._ one night on beer
and rum, and created a disturbance in a workshop at Sheffield.
_Facts in “Sheffield Star,” November 11, 1916_
Mr. Justice Atkin, charging the Grand Jury at Bristol, said that in
nearly every case where a soldier was tried in the Western Circuit
the defence was drink. One lad of 18 was treated to eight pints of
beer in two hours, and did not know what happened. That sort of
thing, said the judge, must seriously impair the efficiency of the
troops when sent to the Front.
_Record of Bristol Assizes, Autumn 1914_
Two boys, 15 and 17, were fined for being drunk in munition works.
One was discovered just in time to save him from carrying molten
liquid.
_Birmingham Munitions Tribunal, Dec. 1916_
“A boy joined the Royal Navy as a carpenter, living in barracks and
working on shore. Every day he was given ‘grog’ for his rations,
although he never asked for it and never took it.”
_Facts in letter to the Author_
Such are the tragedies of boys handed over in our camps to drink and its
temptations. What of the girls in our munition shops? They have learned
to drink in thousands since the war began—respectable girls leaving home
to go into munitions, respectable young wives alone at home. With no
restraining hand upon them, with new companionships and pocket-money
flowing freely, it is not surprising the temptation should be too strong
for them. We can take only one or two cases.
The girl-wife of a Cardiff seaman died in the street from exposure
after drinking in publichouses with other girls.
_Records of Pontypridd Coroner, December 27, 1916_
A publican at Lincoln was fined £5 for allowing children to be drunk
on his premises. Ruth Onyon, 14, and Rose Herrick, 16, were found in
his house with a soldier. They had been in five houses and had ten
drinks each and reached home helplessly drunk.
_Facts in “Sheffield Daily Telegraph,” Sept. 1, 1916_
A number of cartridge workers were summoned for taking drink into a
munition works. One young woman was led to the surgery drunk at
half-past four in the morning; another was discharged because she
could not stand. Sixteen girls subscribed for four bottles of wine
and whisky.
_Records of Leeds Munitions Tribunal, April 28, 1916_
Two girls of 16 and 17 were fined for being helplessly drunk in an
explosive works, the magistrates pointing out that their conduct
imperilled the lives of other workers.
_Records of Coventry Munitions Tribunal July 24, 1916_
The men and girls at a large armament works drank all night. Girls
would lurch into the dormitory dead drunk at 2 a. m.; one lady was
up till 4 a. m. letting in drunken girls. As a result of drunkenness
there was an explosion at these works, two men being killed and six
injured.
_Facts in “Spectator,” Jan. 20, 1917_
A Dublin publichouse was found full of girls and soldiers, all
drunk. Three drunken girls were taken away by six soldiers.
_Facts in “Irish Times,” April 20, 1916_
In half an hour 367 girls entered Birmingham publichouses, scores
under 18. Stout and beer were chiefly drunk, but whisky and water
also, and some port wine. Ten young girls were quite drunk.
_Facts in “Birmingham Daily Post”_
Will some Member of Parliament please ask,
=in view of the fact that American soldiers are not to touch alcohol,
what arrangements the Government proposes to make for them in this
country?=
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to the Homeland
Everywhere we hope and pray for peace, for the day when the men will
come home; but we may dread the day if the men come home to drink and
its temptations. The sudden release of millions of men, the certain
reaction after the terrible stress of these three years, is fearful to
contemplate with the door of the tap-room open. There would be an end of
civilization itself for days and weeks and months, and for many a town
at home the Peace would be worse than the War.
We owe it to these men to listen to the warning of the Prison
Commissioners who printed these words in their report last year:
=When war is succeeded by peace there will come a time of trial for
those who have never turned their backs to a bodily enemy. With the
passing of military discipline our brave fellows will be tempted to
forget the hardships and miseries of the trenches in a burst of
uncontrolled pleasure and license, and, if trade be bad and work
difficult to obtain, the lapse may, if not checked, become a step on a
downward career.=
It is not imagination merely. Judges, coroners, police, and all who face
the crime and misery of life, know well the bitter things that happen
when men come home without restraint. There are witnesses innumerable.
Let us hear a few of them.
A captain in the Royal Flying Corps drove a motor-car through
London, knocked a man down, drove on, and ignored the police, who
eventually mounted the footboard and found the officer drunk.
_Bow Street Police Records, June 3, 1916_
A lance-corporal on Chesterfield station was so drunk that he walked
off the platform and fell on the line as a passenger train came up.
_Chesterfield Police Records, June 2, 1915_
A corporal of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, leaving the
Front with 150 rounds of ammunition and his service rifle, came out
drunk into the streets of West Ham and began firing his rifle.
_Facts in “Daily Chronicle,” July 10, 1915_
A soldier who had received a cartridge from his son at the Front,
put it in his rifle, and while drunk fired it in the streets of
Manchester.
_Manchester Police Records, January 27, 1915_
In the early hours of the morning two unarmed soldiers were fired at
in Woolwich by a drunken soldier, who chased them for a long
distance, firing shots all the time, until he was arrested.
_Facts in “Alliance News,” February, 1915_
Drunkenness among soldiers and sailors is appalling. Unoffending
travellers are delayed by drunken sentries. Sailors landing after
weeks of arduous toil in the North Sea find it easy to get so drunk
that some are drowned, some die from exposure, and many return to
their ships in a condition of helpless inebriety.
_Facts in “Inverness Courier,” May 1915_
Two drunken soldiers entered the parish church at Codford, set fire
to the vestry, threw down the altar cross and candlestick, broke a
stained-glass window, and tore leaves out of a Bible 200 years old.
_Facts in “Daily Chronicle,” April 3, 1916_
A drunken soldier at Cannock was imprisoned for drawing his bayonet
in the streets. “If I meet a policeman I will murder the dog,” he
said, and, meeting one, he threatened to cut off his head.
_Police Records at Cannock, March 1916_
400 soldiers tried to get a drunken man from the police in Grantham.
_Facts in “Grimsby News,” July 30, 1915_
A drunken sergeant was found forcibly detaining a girl at Hornsey.
On the police interfering, the drunken soldier drew his bayonet.
_Facts in “Daily News,” September 7, 1916_
Three splendid-looking fellows, minesweepers, were traveling on the
Highland Railway. “All were married men,” said a fellow passenger,
“happy and proud of their homes, and they spoke with ache still in
their hearts something of their lives and work. Well, these men
succumbed during the journey. A change of trains was their
opportunity, and I left them in a nearly helpless condition.”
_Facts in “The Spectator,” April 8, 1916_
A lady visited a soldier’s wife and found her at home with all her
clothes in pawn. Her husband and brother had both been home from the
Front, and in one week had spent £8 on drink.
_Facts in the “Cork Constitution,” Dec. 10, 1915_
A labourer, home from tunnelling work at the Front, was fined 13_s._
for drunkenness on his 33rd appearance, having spent £45 in seven
days.
_Facts in “Daily News,” Oct. 11, 1916_
A disabled soldier was selling papers in Kingsway, London. He was
proud of his military record and the character his colonel gave him.
He was trying to compound for a pension; he thought he would settle
for £50. “Mind you,” said he “there is not a better character in
London than mine, and I shall get the £50. Then I shall have a
month’s booze.” “What, with that fine character of yours?” a
gentleman said to him. “Yes,” said the man, “when I came home, and
could leave the hospital, there was £50 due to me, and I had a
regular booze.”
_Facts known to the Author_
A soldier with twelve years’ clean record in the Army was sentenced
for felony after being made drunk by his friends.
_Police Records of Southport, January 9, 1915_
No Government has ever received more warnings than the three war
Governments have received concerning drink. There is no room for them
here, but we may call a few witnesses such as cannot be ignored by a
nation looking forward to the day when millions of men will be home
again.
A house in Westminster reeked with filth and drink and drunken
overseas soldiers, “and it would be better,” said the Crown
Solicitor, “if power were given to the police to sweep such places
off the earth.”
_Westminster Police Records, Aug. 1916_
A sapper seaman was found dead at the quay. Another seaman said his
friend had seven drinks. They left the publichouse arm-in-arm, and
went to the quay. There he saw a corporal, who was boatswain for the
night, and was drunk. Leaving the sapper, he got the corporal into
the boat, and went back for his friend, but the sapper had
disappeared.
The lieutenant: “The deceased was one of the quietest boys who had
ever been on the ship, and one of the best oarsmen. The whole
trouble was that it was pay day.”
The Coroner: “Prohibition during the war would be a blessing to all.
It seems to be a very rotten state of affairs.”
The foreman: “Drink.”
The lieutenant: “Prohibition would be the best thing.”
The Coroner: “This poor man, unfortunately, is one of many.”
_Facts in “Western Daily Mercury,” January 8, 1917_
A publican at Dover was fined £20 for selling a bottle of whisky to
a sailor. The Admiral said drink undermined the efficiency of the
patrol vessels, and those who supplied it directly assisted the
enemy, and might be the cause of the loss of very many lives.
_Police Records of Dover, October 6, 1916_
A private in the Northumberland Fusiliers, aged 23, was charged with
burglary while drunk. His father and three brothers were in the
Army. He took part in the battle of Loos, was wounded at Salonika,
and was recommended for distinction for helping to save a wounded
officer.
During the whole of Christmas leave he was drinking, made drunk by
his friends who were probably proud of his having held part of a
trench against a German bombing party. His captain described him as
a good soldier in peace, and brave in action—a man whose disgrace
would be felt by the regiment.
Mr. Justice Rowlatt said everyone was hoping for the time when
millions of brave men would come home after facing incredible
dangers, and we must look forward almost with terror to having these
men exposed to drink and its temptations. What would be the state of
the country in such a case unless we could make a clean sweep of
drink? We should have to face this question over and over again, and
the sooner we faced it the better.
_Records of Derbyshire Assizes, February 1917_
Whoever allowed soldiers or sailors to drink to excess, said the
Mayor of Tynemouth, should be tried by court-martial for treason. He
would be recreant in his duty to God, to himself, and to the
citizens, if he did not call attention to the brutalising of so many
townspeople and the callous conduct of the “waster” element in the
drink trade. He had no quarrel with those who conducted their
business properly.
_Facts in Tynemouth papers, February, 1915_
The Aldershot command appealed for the closing of half the
publichouses, to save the men from temptation when the troops are
demobilised and return with their pockets full of money.
_Record of Workingham Licensing Sessions, 1917_
The _Army and Navy Gazette_, in an article disapproving of the
Prohibition Campaign, issues a terrible warning which should be
printed on the door of the room in which the Army Council meets.
These are its words:
“It is on record that towards the end of the siege of Sebastopol rum
was made too regular an issue, with the result that almost every
soldier who survived to return home became a drunkard.”
The siege of Sebastopol lasted less than a year, and that is the work of
the rum issue for a few months. If rum does that in months, what will it
do in years?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Into the Firing Line
Lord Kitchener is dead, but there are two things that are with us
still—that rare little note that he gave to his men as they went out,
warning them of drink; and that infamous note sent out by a drink firm
in London, begging our people to send out drink to our men. They can
guarantee it right up to the firing line, they say, and even when our
shells could not get there through drink, drink seems to have found its
way. It can get on to transports when the Ministry of Munitions is
waiting urgently for shipping space; it can commandeer our vans and
horses and trains when these mean life or death to us; it seems to get
past any regulation; it goes about with the power of a king, doing its
work where it will.
It is regrettable that our troops at the Front cannot get more
British Beer.
Managing Director of Allsopps, July 14, 1916
Dear Sir, In answer to your inquiry, the only limitation in the size
of cases consigned to officers in the Expeditionary Force is that
they must not exceed 1 cwt.
We can guarantee delivery right into the front trenches. The cases
are handed over at Southampton to the Military Forwarding Officer,
and the A.S.C. see them right through. We are shipping hundreds of
cases weekly. Yours faithfully,
_Letter from a Wine and Spirit firm in London_
So drink finds its way to the front, to weaken our troops, with all
their matchless heroism. Let us call the witnesses who have seen the
work it does.
Soldiers at the front, tried for drunkenness, have declared that
they have received drink from home. Men sometimes receive flasks in
the trenches. They are exhausted, the stimulant revives them for a
minute or two, and the harm is done. “And then (says Col. Crozier)
they get about two years’ hard labour.”
_Letter from Colonel Crozier, commanding 9th Royal Irish Rifles_
As a result of a Court-martial investigating charges of excessive
drinking among the officers of a regiment at the Front, the Army
Council removed the commanding officer from his post.
_Records of Court-martials, 1916_
In the torrid climate of Mesopotamia, in defiance of all military
medical history, rum was issued to the men instead of food and
sterile water, and the presence of cholera, dysentery and other
diseases, was attributed to this by Sir Victor Horsley. “Our gross
failures and stupidity,” he said, “are in my opinion due to whisky
affecting the intellectual organs and clearness of our leaders. They
do not realise that alcohol in small doses acts as a brake on the
brain.”
_Facts in a letter from Sir Victor Horsley, May 13, 1916_
[Illustration: THE JUNKER’S LITTLE BROTHER]
Battalion Headquarters—colonel and chaplain present. Enter Adjutant:
“The rum ration is due tonight, sir; am I to distribute it?” The
colonel (nobly and in a voice audible all over the trench): “No!
Damn the rum! To hell with the rum!”
_Chaplain’s letter in “Alliance News,” June 1916_
At a court-martial in Newcastle, a sergeant-major, charged with
misappropriating funds of the sergeant’s mess, pleaded that during
this period a resolution of the mess had come into effect, providing
free drinks during Christmas and the New Year.
_Facts in “Daily News,” April 17, 1916_
“In the Flying Services one has seen more than one good man go to
the dogs through drink, or become fat and flabby and useless through
just the excess of alcohol which falls short of taking to drink in
the usual acceptance of the term. More men take to drink because of
the ‘have another’ custom than because they like or need alcohol,
and simple Prohibition would stop all this nonsense straight away.
This kindly note is not the outpouring of a teetotal fanatic, for I
suppose I have paid in my time rather more than my share of the
nation’s drink-bill; it is merely a perfectly sound argument in
favour of increasing the nation’s efficiency at the expense of its
chief bad habit.”
_The Editor of “The Aeroplane”_
A lieutenant in the trenches, knowing that the rum ration made him
cold, threw his rum on the ground. His captain saw him, and
threatened to report him. “You do, sir,” said the lieutenant, “and I
will report you for being drunk on duty.”
_Facts in possession of the Author_
A seaman serving on a ship in Cork Harbour died from alcohol. Found
drunk and unknown, he was put on a stretcher and died.
_Facts in “Cork Constitution,” December 9, 1915_
“Over three-quarters of the court-martials I have had anything to do
with are due directly or indirectly to drunkenness. Many thousands
of competent N.C.O.s and soldiers have been punished, and become
useless to the nation during their punishment, as a result of drink.
“I have never been a teetotaler, and have rather opposed the radical
temperance agitation, but am now changing my views as I see our
success over here hampered and our progress towards victory retarded
so obviously by drink.”
_Letter from a Lieut.-Colonel at the Front, seen by the Author_
The captain of a British merchant ship, drunk on the bridge, ordered
his chief gunner to fire 50 rounds of shell at nothing. The gunner
fired four rounds to appease him. Going through the Mediterranean,
the drunken captain ordered his gunner to fire at a British hospital
ship, and the incident led to a struggle for life, which ended in
the captain’s being put in irons, tried, and sentenced to five
years’ penal servitude.
_Record of Devon Assizes, Exeter, February 2, 1917_
An officer was left in charge of a British ship. Mad with drink, he
went among the men and shot one dead. He is now in an asylum.
_Case reported to the Admiralty_
The crew of a Dutch ship arriving in the Tyne was placed under a
naval guard after a drunken riot in which three were killed.
_Facts in “Daily News,” September 14, 1915_
The captain of a Norwegian barque mysteriously disappeared, and the
vessel arrived in port from the North Sea. The mate, who had been
drinking heavily, was seen, with a hammer in his hand, with the
captain in a corner, bleeding from wounds about the head.
_Facts in “Daily News,” April 8, 1916_
A seaman ashore in Glasgow, “wild with drink and passion,” was
terribly wounded in a quarrel in a public-house, and died the same
night. A youth of 19 was sentenced to five years’ penal servitude.
_Records of Edinburgh High Court, Dec. 1916_
A barge-loader at West India Docks died from alcohol, and three
other men were removed in an ambulance after drinking rum.
_Facts in “Daily Chronicle,” May 9, 1916_
Orders were given on a steamer for the boats to be swung out in
readiness for submarines. The first and second officer, having been
drinking, could not do their duty.
_Records of Liverpool Marine Board, April 13, 1917_
The jury returned a verdict of murder against a youth of 19 who,
after drinking one night, went on to his ship and killed the second
officer.
_Records of Hull Coroner, April 24, 1917_
A drunken captain in command of a drifter landed with an armed party
on the Isle of Man. He posted the men on the quay, and gave them
orders to allow no one to pass. Declaring he would shoot every
person who came within reach, he fired twice, and threatened to kill
two police officers.
_Facts in “Times,” October 6, 1916_
Such is the work of drink wherever it finds a soldier to entrap—the
drink the Navy carries free from Southampton to the trenches; and from
America comes the news, as this page is being written, that the Army and
the Navy of our Western Ally, like the Army and the Navy of our Eastern
Ally, are to be under Total Prohibition.
Will some Member of Parliament please ask
=how much bread is destroyed each week to make beer for German
internment camps in this country?=
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Drink and the Red Cross
If the full story could ever be told of the national tragedy of drink
and the war there would be no more ghastly chapter than that which would
tell how drink fought the Red Cross; how, without pity, it hindered the
work of mercy that is the general consolation of the world in days like
these.
We are coming to a famine not only in food, but in doctors. The
death-roll has been heavy beyond all parallel; the strain on the medical
services has been almost too great to be borne, and we look anxiously
round to know where the doctors and nurses will come from. With
Prohibition the problem would be largely solved, for the ordinary burden
of life would be largely lifted from our doctors and hospitals, and
thousands of men and women would be free to give themselves to the war
instead of mending up and patching up the sordid effects of drink. A
rich brewer gave a donation for extending a hospital. “Ah! but we should
not have to extend if he would shut up his public-houses,” said a
doctor.
It is easy to see how drink is telling all the time against our doctors,
our nurses, and our hospitals everywhere. Let us call a few witnesses.
Somebody gave a glass of neat whisky to two wounded men at a garden
party in Tottenham. Both were drunk when the brake came to take them
home, and one died on the way.
_Facts in “Sheffield Telegraph,” September 3, 1915_
Three wounded soldiers at Oxford were overcome by four bottles of
rum smuggled into the hospital by visitors, and one of the men died.
_Records of Oxford Coroner, January 1916_
A wounded soldier asked for two hours’ leave, came back in four
hours drunk with whisky, and died after a terrible night in the
hospital.
_Facts in “Daily Mail”_
Two limbless soldiers were found helplessly drunk on the pavement at
Brighton. A publican was fined £20.
_Facts in “Daily Chronicle,” November 25, 1916_
A wounded soldier, mentioned in despatches, was charged with causing
the death of a soldier with whom he had been drinking. Reeling under
a heavy blow, the injured man was helped to bed, but when the bugle
sounded in the morning he was dead.
_Facts in “Daily Mail,” December 21, 1915_
A soldier, aged 29, with a gunshot wound in his arm, died from
alcohol at Oxford. One Sunday night he and two other wounded
soldiers consumed four bottles of rum brought into the hospital.
_Records of Oxford Coroner, January 10, 1916_
Three soldiers in hospital uniform were found lying helplessly drunk
on the tramlines of Sheffield. Two were back from the Dardanelles.
_Facts in “Sheffield Star,” March 2, 1916_
Seamen on a ship bringing wounded to England from Boulogne were so
drunk that they interfered with the stretcher bearers, and one fell
across a wounded soldier lying on deck.
_Police Records of Southampton, May 14, 1915_
There was a paralysed and helpless man who was found hopelessly
drunk in hospital after his friends had visited him.
_Statement by Lieut.-Col. Sir Alfred Pearce Gould_
An officer who has trained hundreds of men for the ambulance corps
declared that a large percentage of wounded are in a very nervous
condition, in which alcohol means collapse and almost certain death.
_Quoted in “Daily Mail”_
Lying helpless at a London station, moaning on the ground in drunken
delirium, was a lad in hospital blue who had, in truth, been wounded
by his friends. Drink was taking him again through the worst of his
experiences, and his mental pain was pitiable to see.
_Facts in the “Globe,” January, 1917_
Two drunken soldiers from Gallipoli made what a doctor described as
the most savage attack he ever saw on a civilian. They held a young
man’s head against a wall and pounded him unmercifully.
_Facts in “Daily News,” August 19, 1916_
A party of soldiers were seriously injured in a struggle to arrest a
drunken private at Pontefract. The publican called on the men in his
taproom to rescue the private, but the sergeants drove them off.
_Facts in “Daily News,” October 5, 1914_
A sergeant of a Welsh regiment, invited to drink by friends in
Waterloo Road, was picked up as he lay senseless, his pulse beating
feebly, his eyes wide open, and his body starving with cold.
_Facts in “Daily News,” February 14, 1916_
A drunken man rushed from a publichouse and kicked a soldier
unconscious. The military police, chasing the man, were stoned. Four
soldiers were injured, one having his head cut open, and the
military were ordered to clear the place with fixed bayonets.
_Facts in “Daily News,” August 11, 1915_
The medical officer in charge of the Mental Block of a large
military hospital said to the Colonel: “I have the worst job of all,
and it is through Drink, Drink, Drink! Men recover fairly soon from
shell shock, but officers, especially the younger ones, who
habitually take wines and spirits, are subject to relapses every few
days. It is awful!”
_Facts in “National Temperance Quarterly,” May 1917_
Of the thirty war hospitals in Hertfordshire, with 8000 men passing
through them in the first thirty months of the war, there is not one
that has not had trouble with drink.
_Facts known to the Author_
A doctor from a Canadian hospital said a large percentage of their
troops had had to be sent back to Canada rendered permanently insane
through the action of alcohol.
_Facts in “Daily News,” October 31, 1916_
One terrible truth remains to be told of the crime of drink against the
Red Cross. The most blessed thing in all the world today is alcohol, for
it makes chloroform and ether, which soothe the pain of men. We cannot
get enough of either of these consoling drugs, yet we go on wasting
precious food to make more alcohol _to add to the sum of misery and
pain_.
Will some Member of Parliament please ask
=whether the bread ration applies equally to all; or if it may be
exceeded if the excess is drunk instead of being eaten?=
and
=how many brewers’ vats have been imported this year on ships which had
no room for urgent munitions of war?=
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Stabbing the Army in the Back
All the world is learning now that the drink trade is the great
confederate of venereal disease. It leads a man into temptation,
destroys his power of resistance, and retards his chances of recovery.
We can never know the truth about the extent of this disease, about the
way in which the liquor trade, by breaking down tens of thousands of our
men, has stabbed the Army in the back. But the number of soldiers
incapacitated by this disease through drink is enormously greater than
the number incapacitated by the most subtle or dramatic stroke devised
by the German staff.
The lost man-power of the Army through this disease must be equal to the
whole of the original British Expeditionary Force. The Government has
given us figures for the Army at home last year, and they are 43 per
1,000—or over 100,000 cases for an army of 2,500,000 men. There were
7,000 cases in one Canadian camp alone.
Here are the black facts revealed in a debate in Parliament on April 23,
1917, when two distinguished Army officers, speaking with great
restraint, sought to open the eyes of the nation to this plague fostered
in our camps by drink:
“During the war we have had admitted into the hospitals of England
over 70,000 cases of gonorrhœa, over 20,000 cases of syphilis, and
over 6000 cases of another disease somewhat similar. I am quite
openly prepared to state that of these 20,000 cases of syphilis you
do not get much work out of them under two and a half years. I know
from what I have seen of the modern conditions of this War that you
may absolutely wipe them out, except for a few handfuls.
“When you come to the great mass of casualties under this head ...
the figures mean that you have =a Division constantly out of
action=. If you have anything like 70,000 men enfeebled, you find
that you suffer to that extent also. It is not only that you lose
the men, and not only the men who are partially cured are suffering
for many months to come, but their chances of recovery from wounds
are not nearly so good.
“I know of a hospital for venereal cases which it was found
necessary to expand from its normal accommodation for 500 or 600 up
to 2,000 cases, and they are continually full. It is a British
hospital in France. A figure I should like to submit to challenge is
that during the course of the war between 40,000 and 50,000 cases of
syphilis have passed through our hospitals in France. When you come
to gonorrhœa, the figure given me which covers that is between
150,000 and 200,000 cases.”
_Captain Guest in Parliament, April 23, 1917_
“Every Canadian soldier who comes to this country arrives here not
only a first-class specimen of a fine soldier, but as clean-limbed
and as clean a man as the Creator Himself could create. The fact
that in one only of the three Canadian camps in this country 7,000
of these clean Canadian boys went through the hospital for venereal
disease in fourteen months is not only a great discredit to any
Government in this country but has an effect in Canada which I can
assure the House does not make for a better feeling with the Home
Country, and does not make for what we all desire—Imperial Unity.”
_Colonel Sir Hamar Greenwood in Parliament, April 23, 1917_
Those are unchallenged statements made in the House of Commons itself;
they stand as a terrible indictment of this disease, and it is not to be
denied that this evil could never have reached its present frightful
proportions if Parliament had followed the King. Let us look at a few
examples of the ravages of this vice allied so closely to the
public-house.
It is not possible to tell the whole truth about drink; the language
in which it must be written would be offensive in a civilised
country. It must be said, simply, that soldiers in England have been
court-martialled for having been influenced by drink to commit
unspeakable offences against animals.
_Facts in Records of Court-Martials_
A special constable in a harlot-haunted district in London describes
how these harpies carry off lonely soldiers to their rooms, make
them drunk, and finally innoculate them, as likely as not, with
disease. Is it not possible to hold in check these women who prey
upon and poison our soldiers? asks Sir Conan Doyle.
_Letter in the “Times”_
One of the hot-beds of venereal disease to which drink leads our
soldiers, was kept by an Austrian woman in Lambeth, who was
receiving 15_s._ a week from the Austrian Government in April 1916,
and used to lure our soldiers when weakened by drink. All the men
seen to enter this house were either soldiers or sailors.
_Police Records of Lambeth_
A soldier from the Front with £18 was taken by a married woman to
her home, where he was found after a drunken bout with eight women,
all drunk. The woman’s children were terribly neglected.
_Police Records of St. Helens, November 30, 1915_
If you describe the Waterloo Road and the back streets as an open
sewer you will be somewhere near the truth. Not a day goes by
without bringing some soldier who has been waylaid.
_Facts in the “Times,” February 22, 1917_
A soldier came from the Front to go home to Scotland. He got drunk
near Waterloo, losing all his money and his railway pass. He spent
his leave living on charity, and returned to the Front without
having been near either his home or his friends.
_Facts in “Daily News,” February 14, 1916_
Here is the official proof of the relation of the drink trade to this
traffic in disease. It is from the Report of the Royal Commission:
Abundant evidence was given as to the intimate relation between
alcohol and venereal diseases.
Alcohol renders a man liable to yield to temptations which he might
otherwise resist, and aggravates the disease by diminishing the
resistance of the individual.
Alcoholism makes latent syphilis and gonorrhœa active.
Our evidence tends to show that the communication in disease is
frequently due to indulgence in intoxicants, and there is no doubt
that the growth of temperance among the population would help to
bring about an amelioration of the very serious conditions which our
enquiry has revealed.
We desire, therefore, to place on record our opinion that action
should be taken without delay.
Will some Member of Parliament please ask
=if, in view of Lord D’Abernon’s statement that Prohibition has failed
in Canada, the Government will issue the figures showing the decrease of
crime and the increase of wealth?=
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Price the Empire Pays
It is a bitter irony that while the men of the Empire have come to
France to fight the enemy of mankind, this foe within our gates has
struck a blow at the British Empire that generations will not heal. How
many Empire men this private trade has slain we do not know, but we know
beyond all challenge that it has weakened the bonds that bind our
Dominions to the Motherland. This trade that throttles us at home can
pull the Empire down, and it has started well. It has struck its blow at
Canada.
Let us look at the plain facts which in other days than these would have
caused a storm of anger that Parliament could not have ignored. Canada
has followed the King; arming herself with her full powers, flinging
herself upon her enemies with her utmost strength, she has swept drink
out of Canada almost from sea to sea. But even before she did this
Canada saw that alcohol must go from her camps if her men were to be fit
to fight for England, and long before the Prohibition wave swept across
the country, the Canadian Government removed all alcohol from the
training camps. It was the deliberate choice of a Government and its
people, and from that day to this there has been no reason for regret.
So the young manhood of Canada, rallying to the flag, was guarded from
alcohol. She poured out her men in hundreds of thousands; they came to
us from Prohibition camps; they came in Prohibition ships, and even here
this trade that has us in its grip was not allowed at first in the
Canadian camps; the only condition that Canada made—a condition implied
but clearly understood—was properly regarded and obeyed.
We respected the desire of Canada, and kept her soldiers free from drink
in their own camps. But a soldier cannot keep in camp, and in the
villages around the Drink Trade waits in every street. The military
authorities were willing for the Canadian Government to have their way
inside the camps, but drink was free outside, and in these public-houses
there was sown the seed that may one day break this Empire. The Drink
Trade was so rampant outside the Canadian camps that Prohibition inside
was almost in vain. We had to decide between breaking the word of the
Canadian Government to its people or dealing with this trade as Canada
herself has done; as Russia has done; as France and America are doing.
It was the Empire or the drink traffic, and the drink traffic won, as it
always wins with us.
It came about in October, down on Salisbury Plain. During one week-end a
number of Canadian troops gave way to drinking in villages around the
camps, and it was then that the grave decision was come to that the
drink trade should be allowed to set up its horrible canteens in every
Canadian camp. The change was made at the request of a British General,
and we have the assurance of the Prime Minister of Canada that the
approval of the Canadian Government was neither obtained nor asked. In
handing the Canadian Army over to the drink canteens, in deliberately
reversing the policy of the Canadian Government and its people, there
was no consultation with Canada.
It is important to remember that this decision, fraught with tragic and
far-reaching consequences for the Empire, was a pure and simple English
act. We may imagine the Canadian view from the remark of a Canadian
General, who said, “I know drink is a hindrance, but I can do very
little, because in military circles in this country drunkenness is not
considered a very serious offense.”
It would have been surprising if there had not poured in upon our
Government a stream of protests, and from all parts of the Dominions
they came. The Dominion of Canada, giving freely to the Motherland
450,000 boys and men, was moved to passionate indignation that England
should scorn her love for them, should ignore the pleadings of their
mothers and sisters, and should put in their way the temptations from
which they were saved at home. Canada does not want our drink trade; she
lives side by side with the United States, she sees that great country
building up its future free from drink, and she sees America, splendid
ally in war, as a mighty rival in peace.
And Canada is ready for the Reconstruction. She has followed the
Prohibition lead of the United States, and already she has ceased to be
a borrowing country. The very first year of Prohibition has seen this
young Dominion, for the first time in her history, financially
self-sustaining. Crime is disappearing; social gatherings are held in
her gaols; she has set up vast munition workshops, and instead of
borrowing money for her own support she has made hundreds of millions’
worth of munitions for which this country need not pay until the war is
over, and then need never pay at all for the munitions the Canadians
have used. Canada is in deadly earliest. She kept her men away from
drink to make them fit; she has swept it away to make a clean country
for those who go back.
And what is England’s contribution to this Imperial Reconstruction? _We
have scorned it all._ The Prime Minister has said that this drink trade
is so horrible that it is worth this horrible war to settle with it, yet
we have sacrificed the love of Canada on our brewers’ altar. We can
believe the Canadian who declares his profound conviction that but for
this Canada would have sent us 100,000 more recruits; we can believe it
is true that where responsible Canadians meet together in these days the
talk is of how long the tie will last unbroken that binds the daughter
to the Motherland. We can understand the passion that lies behind the
resolutions that come to Downing Street from Nova Scotia; we know the
depth of the yearning of those 64,000 mothers and wives of Toronto who
signed that great petition to the Government of Canada begging it in the
name of God to intervene.
We can understand it all; but let us call the witnesses, and let us see
the price the Dominion pays for our quailing before this Kaiser’s trade.
Those Who Will Not Go Back
It is the great consolation of Canada that, though their sons may fall
before this tempter’s trade in Britain, they will go back to a Canada
free from drink. But some will never go back, and they are not on the
Roll of Honour. They have been destroyed by the enemy within our gate,
this trade that traps men on their way to France and digs their graves.
A young Canadian who had never tasted alcohol came from a
Prohibition camp in Canada, came to England on a Prohibition ship,
and was put in a camp with a drink canteen. He started drinking and
contracted venereal disease. Ordered home as unfit, in fear and
shame he sought a friend’s advice about the girl he was to marry.
“You can never marry her,” said his friend, and that night in his
hut the young Canadian blew out his brains.
_Facts in possession of the Author_
A young Canadian officer was sent home disgraced. Sodden with
alcohol, he left the train and shot a railway clerk dead.
_Facts in Montreal “Weekly Witness,” October 24, 1916_
A Russian soldier in the Canadian forces, described as a clean,
soldierly man, with a splendid character from his officer, was
charged with the murder of a Canadian private who tried to separate
two quarrelling soldiers in a bar. The prisoner had drunk much
whisky and remembered nothing of his crime, and was sentenced to
twelve months’ hard labour for manslaughter. The judge hoped he
might be used as a soldier _in the Russian Army_.
_Record of Hampshire Assizes, February 1916_
A man from Prohibition Russia enlisted in Prohibition Canada, and
came to England. He spent 9_s._ on drink one day, and that night he
crept from his bed and killed his corporal at Witley Camp.
_Police Records of Godalming, February 1917_
A Canadian soldier, aged 26, after a publichouse quarrel with
another soldier, was found dying on the pavement in Hastings. His
throat had been cut, and he died on entering the hospital. The other
soldier was charged with murder, and sentenced to 15 years.
_Record of Hastings Assizes, March 1917_
A young Canadian soldier, aged 20, died from alcohol while in
training at Witley. He had a bottle of stout followed by nine or ten
“double-headers” of neat whisky in about two hours. He was carried
back to camp, laid unconscious on his bed, and died.
_Facts in “Daily Chronicle,” March 22, 1917_
A Canadian lieutenant was tried for the murder of a canteen
sergeant. They arrived together at a house at Grayshott, where the
lieutenant asked for some strong drink and took a bottle of whisky
and two glasses. The sergeant was afterwards found dead in the
cellar, and the lieutenant carried the body into the stable.
_Records of Grayshott Coroner, December 1915_
A man leaving a publichouse in company with a woman, with whom he
had been drinking, met a Canadian soldier not far from Charing
Cross. The soldier spoke, and the man struck him. The soldier was
carried to the hospital, where he died soon afterwards from a wound
two inches deep, caused by a knife.
_Police Records of Bow Street, January 1, 1917_
The wife of a gunner in the South African Heavy Artillery died at
Bexhill from alcohol. The soldier said he bought 12 bottles of stout
and 12 bottles of beer, one of whisky, and one of port, which they
drank between Saturday night and Monday night.
_Records of Bexhill Coroner, December 1915_
A soldier from Toronto, having been drinking away his pay in a
Carlisle publichouse, with another Canadian soldier and some married
women, failed to appear the next morning, and was found dead on a
footpath with a bottle of whisky in his pocket
_Records of Carlisle Coroner, April 14, 1917_
A Canadian soldier, having drawn £20 from the Canadian office,
visited several publichouses, and was killed in a scuffle in London.
_Facts in “Daily News,” December 2, 1916_
The Men From the Prohibition Camps
Again and again we have seen the peculiar temptations of drink among
Canadians. Officers, chief-constables, chaplains, newspapers, the men
themselves, have all borne witness that to these men from Prohibition
Canada the sudden temptations of our drink trade come with terrible
power, and often they fall not knowing. The finest manhood of the Empire
our tap-rooms and canteens destroy, not in isolated cases, but in a host
we dare not number.
Of the soldiers who first came over from Canada, says a great Canadian
paper, many were emigrants from England, not yet securely planted in
Canada, and for their sakes especially drink should have been withheld
from them. Of the larger number of Canadian troops that followed them,
many were youths who had never known drink, and they were taken from
home at the most social and reckless age, to face drink with all the
temptations induced by the nervous strain, the hardships and social
abandon of the camp and the trench, and the free pocket-money when on
leave.
In an officers’ mess of two double companies of Canadians only one
officer drank on his arrival in a canteen camp in England; within
three months there was not an abstainer in the mess.
_Facts told at Society for Study of Inebriety, Jan. 10, 1916_
These men come mostly from districts in Canada where intoxicants are
prohibited by law, and many of them, being young lads, who perhaps
have never tasted liquor before their arrival, fall easy victims.
_Chief Constable of Godalming_
Overseas soldiers come to our hospitals astonishingly cheerful and
fit in a general sense, and wonderfully receptive to treatment. Only
three per thousand die in our great hospitals. This is largely due
to the hardy life of the men and the fact that they are removed from
the danger of taking too much alcohol. The home troops have a much
higher mortality, partly because their use of alcohol diminishes
their chances. Re-admissions are largely due to drink on furlough.
_Major Maclean, M.D., of the Third Western General Hospital_
A Canadian soldier, who had been wounded at the Front, was taken to
a house by women and left alone drunk. An officer gave him an
excellent character, and said he was on his way back to Canada.
These men experience temptations here (he said) that they would not
find in Canada, and there was too much of this going on.
_Hastings Police Records, February 19, 1917_
I heard a sad account of the havoc of the wet canteen and a private
in a Canadian A.M.C. told us of a lad of 17 who is made so drunk
that there is rarely a night when he has not to be helped up to bed.
One of the soldiers here told me of his son in Canada being anxious
to join up, but after seeing the condition of things over here he
was doing all he could to discourage his son.
_Letter to the Author_
The Canadians in most cases are entirely lost when they arrive in
this country, and are much more liable to the temptation which is
thrown in their way, but when you give a figure such as this—that in
one camp during last year, and two months of the previous year,
there were 7,000 cases—it seems to me that it is about time we
realised the magnitude of the evil. I do not know what has happened
to them, except that I imagine a large number have gone back to
Canada, and have not been able to play the part they had hoped to
play.
_Captain Guest in Parliament, April 23, 1917_
In Camp and On Leave
Everywhere we find the trail of drink among Canadians—in camp and on
leave.
A Canadian corporal, wounded in the Battle of Ypres, was found
terribly drunk after being missing all day from hospital. Confronted
with the surgeon after violent acts of insubordination, the corporal
broke down and cried like a child.
_Facts in “Western Mail,” February 18, 1916_
In the first weeks of the war 42 Canadian soldiers disgraced
themselves, by excessive drinking, insubordination, and disorderly
conduct, to such an extent that they had to be sent back to Canada.
_Facts in “Canadian Pioneer,” December 4, 1914_
A Canadian soldier, helplessly drunk, was seen at King’s Cross
station eating, tearing, and crumpling up £1 notes, and would have
lost about fifteen pounds but for kindly help from passers by.
_Facts in “Daily Chronicle,” September 28, 1916_
A gunner from Montreal, missing from camp for several days, drank
himself delirious, and cut his throat with a razor.
_Facts in “Canadian Pioneer,” December 4, 1914_
A Canadian soldier spent £70 in three weeks on drink and bad
characters.
_Facts in “Daily Mail” August 10, 1915_
A Sergeant-Major from Canada declared that he had lost 20 per cent.
of the men of his battery through venereal disease. They had a
little drink, and were captured by the swarm of bad women at
Folkestone.
_Facts in Letter to Author_
A woman was imprisoned for placing young children in moral danger.
Every night the girls brought soldiers home, and colonial soldiers
were frequently so drunk that they were carried in.
_Records of Central Criminal Court, April 25, 1917_
The Rising Storm in Canada
=The thing cannot be justified. It is the blackest tragedy of this
whole war that, in fighting for freedom in Europe, the free sons of
the British breed have to face this war-time record of waste at
home, with its inevitable toll of debauchery and crime.=
_Editorial in “Toronto Globe”_
While this book was being written one of the greatest meetings ever held
in Manchester was cheering a Canadian in khaki who declared that he was
not going hungry while brewers were destroying food, and he went on to
say, this soldier and sportsman well-known in the Dominion:
“Great numbers of our men never saw France. Canadian boys cried
because they had not munitions. England reeled and beer flowed like
water while thousands of our boys went down into their graves. We
will never forget it in Canada.”
We may be sure Canada will not forget. She will not forget her dead: she
will not forget that the Drink Traffic she has swept away at home struck
down her sons in the land for which they fought. “We must know who is to
blame,” says a Canadian paper; “we presume they will have no objection
to have their names placarded before the country, that every mother may
know.” Col. Sir Hamar Greenwood, M. P., has lately returned from Canada,
and this is what he tells us:
“I met many fathers and mothers whose boys had been sent back to
Canada debilitated and ruined for life because they had been
enmeshed by harpies, and again and again these parents have said to
me, ‘We do not mind our boys dying on the field of battle for old
England, but to think that we sent our sons to England to come back
to us ruined in health, and a disgrace to us, to them, and to the
country, is something the Home Country should never ask us to
bear.’”
_Letter from a Solicitor in Ontario to the Author_:
I wonder if the advocates of the drink traffic in Britain appreciate
the contempt in which they are held in Canada. Before the war I had
a class of ten young men. Every one of them is now at the Front, and
one writes that when I told them of the drink conditions in England
he did not believe half of it; now he says I did not tell him half.
Letters from our Canadian soldiers are appearing in our papers, and
they are all amazed at the drinking habits of Britain.
_From a Resolution received by Mr. Lloyd George from the Social
Service Council of Nova Scotia_:
That we, representing the social, moral, and spiritual forces of
this part of the British Empire, who have proved our loyalty by the
thousands of men this small province has sent overseas, do record
our most earnest protest against Britain’s inaction in this matter,
which we are sure must result in longer and increased suffering for
the men we have sent to help her win the war; and do most
insistently plead with the British Government and the British
Parliament that they at once exercise the power vested in them to
strike the blow that will dispose of this enemy at home, and so give
mighty reinforcement to those who are bleeding and dying for Britain
and human liberties on the battlefields abroad.
_Sermon by Dr. Flanders in London, Ontario, Feb. 25, 1917_:
Canada has the right to make this demand on the Motherland from the
simple standpoint of political economics. That we might put the
Dominion into the best possible shape to give the utmost of our
strength in men and munitions, we have an almost Dominion-wide
Prohibition, and no intelligent person will deny that our
contributions to the war from the first have been multiplied and
intensified by that action. Why should little Johnnie Canuck abolish
drink that he might conserve his manhood and material resources in
the interest of the Empire’s war, and big John Bull refuse to
abolish the traffic to the great waste of his material resources and
the undoing of his efficiency?
_A public man with three soldier sons wrote to the Toronto Globe_:
Canada, for efficiency in war, casts out the drink evil. Is it too
much to expect Britain, in fairness, to do the same? Is it not a
mockery for the British Isles to face our common struggle with this
palsy in her frame?
Here is the bitter pill, the embittering thought for many a Canadian
parent. Let me be a type. Three of my sons are in khaki. I gave them
a father’s blessing when they enlisted. But this thought strains,
most of all, the ties of my loyalty to the cause—to see my sons
fight and fall for a Britain that at home is saddled by distillery
interests, and misguided by a Press silent as the grave on this
entrenched evil. Why should our sons go from a country where booze
is banished to spend months on the way to the trenches in England,
where the vices of the liquor traffic are legalised?
_We see the spirit of Canada in those great words of the Premier of
Ontario, Mr. Hearst, speaking of the giving up of drink_:
In this day of national peril, in this day when the future of the
British Empire, the freedom of the world, and the blessings of
democratic government hang in the balance, if I should fail to
listen to what I believe to be the call of duty, if I should neglect
to take every action that in my judgment will help to conserve the
financial strength and power and manhood of this province for the
great struggle in which we are engaged, I would be a traitor to my
country, a traitor to my own conscience, and unworthy of the brave
sons of Canada that are fighting, bleeding and dying for freedom and
for us.
_A letter from one of the most eminent public men in Canada_:
“British Canada is intensely loyal to the Empire and the Allied
Cause, but at present recruiting is almost at an end. Why? Partly
because of considerable dissatisfaction with many of the conditions
which prevail. Suffering, wounds, death, are expected as inevitable
in war, but the evil influences, the lavish temptations of liquor
and bad women which sweep down upon our boys in England, are not
felt to be necessary, and the hearts of multitudes of Canadian
parents are hot with indignation at the apparent indifference of the
authorities to the moral welfare of our troops.”
_Captain John MacNeill, with the Canadian troops in France_:
“I say to you solemnly, if England should lose this war because of
drink, or if England should unnecessarily prolong the war with great
sacrifice of life in her effort to protect drink, or even if England
should win the war in spite of drink, you will have put upon the
bonds of Empire such a strain as they have never known before, and
such a strain as we cannot promise they will be able to survive.”
_From the petition presented to the Prime Minister of Canada, signed
by 64,000 mothers and wives in Toronto_:
1. That Mothers and Wives of Canada in giving their sons and
husbands for King and Empire, asked and received from your Minister
of Militia this only assurance that, in sending them into the ranks,
we were not hereby irrevocably thrusting them into the temptation of
Strong Drink.
2. We appreciated from the depths of our hearts, your action in
abolishing the Wet Canteen from the Canadian Militia. We believe the
Wet Canteen established in the ranks of the front to be a double
danger, robbing our King of the success in arms which in these days
comes only to the brave heart that is controlled by a clear head,
and robbing us and our Canada of the Manhood which we gave into our
Empire’s keeping.
3. We do not believe that the King will refuse the aid of Canada’s
sons; nor that he will appreciate your patriotic efforts the less,
if you keep faith with us and make known to His Majesty, his
Ministers and Commanders, that our boys are sent forth on the one
condition that the dispensing of intoxicating liquors shall be
prohibited in the ranks.
_From a Sermon preached in Ontario, February 25, 1917_:
“Thank God, if any of our Canadian soldiers return to us with the
drink habit formed and raging, we can welcome them to a land nearly
purged of the liquor traffic, where they may have a chance to
recover their manhood.”
_Letter on the effects of Prohibition, from a business man in
Ontario, published in the “Spectator:”_
“Men I have known for years to be regular promenading tanks have
given it up, and are starting a decent life again. The Police Court
is empty. England should try it. It would be, after the first heavy
initial loss, the best thing that ever struck the nation. I cursed
these temperance guys as hard as any, but all the same it cannot
blind you from the truth.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Your Share in the Food Crisis
The Food and Money Wasted on Drink in Our Great Towns
ESTIMATED FROM AUGUST 1914 TO APRIL 1917 INCLUSIVE
by GEORGE B. WILSON, B.A.,
Compiler of the National Drink Bill
───────────────────────┬─────────────┬─────────────┬──────────────
│ Drink Bill │ Grain Lost │Sugar in Beer
───────────────────────┼─────────────┼─────────────┼──────────────
│ │ Tons │ lb.
United Kingdom │ £510,000,000│ 4,400,000│ 762,000,000
London │ £83,000,000│ 693,000│ 120,000,000
Edinburgh │ £3,200,000│ 31,000│ 5,300,000
Dublin │ £2,600,000│ 29,000│ 5,000,000
Glasgow │ £10,500,000│ 101,000│ 17,400,000
Manchester and Salford │ £11,000,000│ 92,000│ 15,900,000
Birmingham │ £9,900,000│ 82,000│ 14,200,000
Liverpool │ £8,800,000│ 73,000│ 12,600,000
Sheffield │ £5,400,000│ 45,000│ 7,800,000
Leeds │ £5,300,000│ 44,000│ 7,600,000
Bristol │ £4,200,000│ 35,000│ 6,000,000
West Ham │ £3,400,000│ 28,000│ 4,900,000
Bradford │ £3,300,000│ 28,000│ 4,800,000
Hull │ £3,300,000│ 27,000│ 4,700,000
Newcastle │ £3,100,000│ 26,000│ 4,500,000
Nottingham │ £3,100,000│ 26,000│ 4,500,000
Portsmouth │ £2,800,000│ 23,000│ 4,400,000
Stoke │ £2,800,000│ 23,000│ 4,000,000
Leicester │ £2,700,000│ 22,000│ 3,800,000
Cardiff │ £2,100,000│ 18,000│ 3,100,000
Bolton │ £2,100,000│ 18,000│ 3,000,000
Croydon │ £2,100,000│ 17,000│ 3,000,000
Sunderland │ £1,700,000│ 14,000│ 2,500,000
Oldham │ £1,700,000│ 14,000│ 2,500,000
Birkenhead │ £1,600,000│ 13,000│ 2,200,000
Blackburn │ £1,500,000│ 13,000│ 2,200,000
Brighton │ £1,500,000│ 13,000│ 2,200,000
Plymouth │ £1,500,000│ 12,000│ 2,100,000
Derby │ £1,400,000│ 12,000│ 2,100,000
Middlesbrough │ £1,400,000│ 12,000│ 2,100,000
Stockport │ £1,400,000│ 12,000│ 2,100,000
Norwich │ £1,400,000│ 12,000│ 2,100,000
Southampton │ £1,400,000│ 12,000│ 2,000,000
Swansea │ £1,400,000│ 12,000│ 2,000,000
Gateshead │ £1,400,000│ 11,000│ 2,000,000
Preston │ £1,400,000│ 11,000│ 1,900,000
Coventry │ £1,300,000│ 11,000│ 1,900,000
Huddersfield │ £1,300,000│ 10,000│ 1,800,000
Halifax │ £1,200,000│ 10,000│ 1,700,000
───────────────────────┴─────────────┴─────────────┴──────────────
PLAY THE GAME
There is one week’s bread in 18 pints of beer
There is one week’s sugar in 16 pints of beer
The man who drinks 3 pints a day drinks another man’s rations.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE FOOD PYRAMIDS DESTROYED FOR DRINK
[Illustration:
The Great Pyramid of Egypt, the biggest construction in stone ever
made by the hands of man—80,000,000 cubic feet of masonry]
[Illustration:
The Great Pyramids of Food, the biggest wilful destruction of food
ever known—180,000,000 cubic feet of food destroyed for the Drink
Trade during the war]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
How the Brewer Gets Our Food
THE MEN WHO BRING IT
It is easy to talk of a mine-sweeper. I wish the whole nation could
understand what these men are doing. They are feeding the whole
population, battling with the elements as well as with the enemy,
battling with dangers overhead and dangers under the sea. The
mine-sweeper is like the soldier daily over the parapet—he carries his
life in his hand.
_First Lord of the Admiralty._
THE PEOPLE WHO WAIT FOR IT
A London caterer ordered a quantity of sugar from the Philippines. The
mine-sweepers cleared the way for it and it reached the docks. The
caterer sent for it, and was informed that it could only be delivered if
it was for a brewer.
A provincial caterer ordered sugar _and paid for it_, but was told by
the Food Controller that it could only be released if _it was sold to a
brewer_.
A working man was discussing rations with his minister in the street.
“It is very hard,” he said, “to keep to your rations when you have five
strapping lads, but we are going to try it.” Then a drunken man lurched
past. The workman pulled himself together, and said, in great passion:
“I tell you what it is, sir, I am not going to let my boys starve as
long as there is food to make beer for men like that.”
THE PRICE WE PAY FOR IT
Immense quantities of food are used for beer and spirits. All this grain
is lost for food purposes. _If this grain were available for food, the
prices of bread and meat would be lowered._
_War Savings Committee._
THE POOR WHO SUFFER FOR IT
“Rationing bread could not be undertaken without grave risk to the
health of the poor.”
_Capt. Bathurst, M. P._
By what right does the Government
use our mine-sweepers to bring in food for brewers to destroy? allow
brewers to increase the cost of living for every household? and allow
the willful destruction of food supplies to imperil the health of the
poor?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Way for the Government
We do not want to be amused by fiddlers while our heroes fight and die.
What are the things we see? We see the Government silent in the presence
of what the greatest paper in our greatest overseas Dominion calls “the
blackest tragedy of the war.” We see a trade which the King declared to
be prolonging the war in the crisis of 1915, prolonging it still in the
crisis of 1917. We see our Prime Minister, who has declared this trade
to be worse than Germany, allowing it to have its way. We see our Prime
Minister, who has said we cannot settle with Germany until we have
settled with drink, fearing to settle with drink. Then are we not to
settle with Germany, and are we to surrender to the greatest enemy of
the three?
There is one clear way before the Government; it is the only way of
straightness and patriotism and honour. It is to wind up this enemy
trade and move from our path the greatest hindrance to the winning of
the war. It is to take our side honourably with our great Allies, to
bring to an end the shameful isolation of Great Britain in the drink map
of the great free countries that appears on the back of this book.
It is the sign of weakness everywhere that it seeks a scapegoat for its
sins, and we hear the everlasting talk of Labour. But it will not do. It
is time these slanders on our workmen ceased.
If the Government is afraid of the working man, let it say so, or let it
try him. If it is afraid of temperance people, let it rally them to its
side as one man on the platform where they meet. If it is afraid of the
Drink Trade, then the time has come to say so, for we who send out our
millions to fight a foreign foe are not going to starve for bread
through fear of enemies within our gate. The Prime Minister gave the
Army its munitions; the Army will use them in vain unless the munitions
of life come into our homes.
Working men are tired of men who fool with food and liberty. They do not
object to any equal sacrifice: they believe in the democratic policy of
the King, who based Prohibition, not on class distinction as the
Government did by closing tap-rooms 15 hours a day and leaving cellars
and Parliamentary bars open always, but on the principle of the King’s
own words that “no difference shall be made, so far as his Majesty is
concerned, between the treatment of the rich and poor in this respect.”
Let the Government follow the King, and the people will follow the
Government.
In the highest interests of the nation and the war let this be said as
plain as words can make it—_that there is no body of temperance opinion
anywhere standing in the way of Prohibition_, but that the united moral
forces of the nation would rally to the Government instantly on an act
of a few words such as this:
=That the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages be totally
prohibited in the United Kingdom for the period of the war and
demobilization, and that a committee be appointed to deal with all the
private and public interests concerned; and that it be resolved upon,
here and now, that reconstruction be accompanied by universal local
option.=
There would be no opposition the Government need count to a proposal
like that.
[Illustration: TYPOGRAPHICAL UNION LABEL WESTERVILLE O.]
* * * * * *
Transcriber’s note:
Obvious typographical and punctuation errors were corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation were retained.
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