LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
STATE PURCHASE.
(To rzoi EDITOR OP THE " SPECTATOR.")
SIR,—Stick to your guns and insist on " Purchase " of the " Trade." It is an honest solution of the drink question, and will be supported by many who hold aloof from other modes of dealing with it. When England changed her mind about the morality of slaveholding she honestly and nobly bought the blacks from their masters and owners, and paid for them. Let us follow the good example set by a past generation, and not seek to satisfy our national conscience by robbing legal owners of their property by [" W. D. K." is inspired by the exact spirit of the Spectator. We not only have always desired to give the shareholders a fair price, but to compensate men who would lose their livelihood through the reduction in sales and licences which is certain to be the result of withdrawing the keen stimulus of private profit. But though we have never varied from this view, and though we have done our best to help the Trade, we have been pursued by the Trade with no small amount of invective. Like the Bourbon Kings, they seem incapable of thinking it possible they can be in any danger. They seem to regard themselves as omnipotent, or at any rate as invulnerable, as they were before the war. Yet they are in fact in great peril. If they reject Purchase, either directly or in. directly, it is certain that before long restriction of a very drastic kind will come, and with it no compensation. It will come in three ways—(1) from developments in the policy of the Control Board; (2) from the demands of those responsible for the mobiliza- tion of man-power for mir purposes; and (3) from the growing and imperative protests of those who feel as we do in regard to food shortage. Only Purchase can save the Trade from a knock. out blow.—En. Spectator.]
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