[TO TEE EDITOR OF TRH "SPECTATOR.") SI11,—As a reader of
the Spectator for over twenty years, I would like to express my appreciation of the consistent patriotic way in which you have treated the liquor question. We could have bought out "the greatest of our enemies" many months ago for less money than we are now expending every week in fighting the others. During that time we would have saved an enormous quantity of valuable food which has been worse than destroyed, and what our saving in labour efficiency would have been no one can calculate. To be exhorted by the Government to save on our necessary food while this waste in permitted to go on is merely an empty mockery. That is the material aspect of the question ; but what of its higher aspects ? We were told very truly that we were engaged in "a spiritual conflict," and from that point of view no one can measure what would have been the great moral uplift of such an act of national renunciation as would have been the shutting of the public-houses, and there is no question but that at one time the people expected it, were ready for it, and would have loyally accepted it. But where are we now ? The liquor interest, together with their financial backers, and the Nationalists have succeeded in intimidating the Government, and have seared them into taking up their abode with Mr. Worldly Wiseman in the town of Carnal Policy, which, according to Bunyan, with the insight of genius, is "hard by the city of Destruction." And so Johnny Walker still stalks with triumphant insolence across the pages of our high-class periodicals, and many of our people in endeavouring to " Be Temperate " and at same time" Drink Dewar's Whisky" are acquiring the fatal thirst unquenchable as that of Dives in the flame And so the parents of the young men who are going into the training camps and to the front are more afraid of what the canteens will do to their boys than what the Germane can do to them. Keep the flag flying ! You are on the right side, and the end is not yet.—I am, Sir, &e.,
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