DRINK AND PRIVATE PROFIT.
T is with the greatest pleasure that we print more - important letters on the Nationalization of the Liquor Trade. Never has there been apparently—we say " apparently " because in the case of the present Govern- ment what is apparent cannot always be taken for what is real—a more favourable junction of powerful forces aiming at a particular reform. On the one side there is the Prime Minister, whose convictions about the necessity of nationalization were stated several times and with singular force during the war ; and on the other side there is, as the letters we are publishing prove, a growing determination in the Labour Party to bring about nationalization. This combination ought to be powerful enough to do anything. We would call particular attention to the letter from Mr. J. H. Thomas, who is the President of the " Labour Campaign for the Public Ownership and Control of the Liquor Trade." It is a gratification, and not a common experience, for the Spectator to be commended by a leader of Labour. We shall not pretend that we are indifferent to this commendation, as we do not feel like those speakers at the Trade Union Congress who apologized for the fact that their opposition to Direct Action had won the applause of men outside their party. For our part, we want all the support we can get for the nationalization of liquor; and since praise means support, we are delighted to get it whether it comes from Labour leaders, or hidebound Tories, or Anarchists, or Bolsheviks. Really, to be ashamed of gaining the support of an opponent, and to apologize for it as some Labour leaders do, is to show a remarkable absence of confidence in one's own cause, not to say of self-respect. If a man believes in his cause, he ought to further it because in his opinion it is right, and for no other reason ; he ought not to be continually looking out of the tail of his eye to see whether what he says is bringing him into suspicion with his own associates because he seems to be making friends outside his own party or class. Only thieves and spies have a good excuse for behaving like that. But this is by the way. The point is that we could not have a more powerful associate in a good cause than Mr. J. H. Thomas, and we have to congratulate those who believe in the nationalization of the Liquor Trade not only on being able to count upon the help of Mr. Thomas, but on being able to count upon the co-operation of the greater part of the Labour Party. For Mr. Thomas is explicit in his letter about this fact. He says that the organization of which he is President is an ad hoc Committee for carrying out the wishes of the Labour Party. If our readers will cast back their minds over the history of the war, they will understand what a tremendous change this means. In 1915, when Mr. Lloyd George had a scheme of nationalization ready, he could have enforced it if he had been able to rely upon the approval of the Labour Party. But that approval was withheld. Up and down the country Labour speakers attributed a great deal of the unrest to the absence of beer—of which they accordingly demanded more. Now the Labour Party is, or we believe shortly will be, in a very different frame of mind. It seems to be determined to act on the resolution in favour of nationalization passed at the Labour Party Conference in June, 1918. It is unthinkable, as Mr. Thomas says, that we should go back to the state of things before the war. Yet a policy of drift means nothing else. If we do go back we shall be disgraced, and we may also be ruined. The Observer not long ago published a collection of Mr. Lloyd George's statements about the Liquor Trade which we have quoted already in the Spectator but must quote again. These statements are an incontrovertible proof of how strongly Mr. Lloyd George feels on this subject :- "Drink is doing much more damage in the war than all the German submarines put together." " Nothing but root-and-branch methods will be of the slightest avail in dealing with this evil."-31r. Lloyd George, February 28th, 1915.
" We are fighting against Germany, Austria, and Drink, and as far as I can see the greatest of these three deadly foes is Drink."—Mr. Lloyd George, March 29th, 1915.
" If nothing were done now to acquire complete and absolute control over the Trade, he feared that when demobilization came there would be an irresistible demand to put the Trade back practically where it had been before. That would be a national disaster. He personally wanted the strong hand of the State to he there instead of a powerful interest which had already beaten them in the past."—Mr. Lloyd George, March 29th, 1917, " What we could afford before the war wo certainly cannot afford after the war, and one of the things we cannot afford is a drink bill of £160,000,000 a year."—Mr. Lloyd George.
" A proper adaptation to peace conditions of the experience which during the war we have gained in regard to the traffic in drink."—Joint Manifesto of Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Sonar Law, November, 1918.
In this situation—with the views of the Prime Minister and of the Labour Party identical—virtually any desired reform in connexion with the Drink Trade can be effected. And wi would ask every one to notice very carefully the impressivi fact that week after week our correspondents agree that the elimination of private profit from the sale of drink is the secret of reform. " Get rid of private profit "—that is the burden of most letters. The whole policy of the Spectator, which is now also the policy of the Labour Party, is implicit in that phrase. It is a good motto, and we believe, moreover, a winning motto.
Mr. Thomas says that we are " on the eve of great developments." These words may signify rather confi- dence in the power of the Labour Party than particular knowledge of the intentions of the Government. In any case the struggle will be severe. This week there has been published a Draft Bill which has been prepared by the Trade for a reform of the licensing laws. Such a reform is of course intended to be an alternative to nationalization. " It should be observed," says the Times, " that the prim ciples enunciated in this Bill are those on which variou- sections of the licensed trade are in agreement "—that is to say, the principles of the Bill have been approved by the Brewers' Society, the National Trade Defence Asso- ciation, and the various Licensed Victuallers' Societies. The ideas embodied in the Draft Bill have not, we should say, a smooth path before them. It is proposed that the licensing authority in any area should be a Licensing Judge. But naturally the Licensing Magistrates will be up in arms against this proposal. They do not want to lose their authority, and they think that they are the best representatives of any district because they have the greatest amount of local knowledge. The Draft Bill does indeed provide that the Licensing Judge should be helped when necessary by a local Advisory Committee ; in other words, local knowledge is to be supplied at one remove. It must be admitted that the Licensing Magis- trates in the past have as a rule stood in the way of making public-houses more pleasant places—places where a man might take his wife and family to spend a pleasant evening, places where social amenities, quite apart from the supply of alcohol, are obtainable. It has never been, of course, the intention of the licensing authorities to prevent such amenities, but they have worked on the general rule that the enlargement of public-houses means more facilities for drinking. They have therefore opposed " structural improvements" as far as possible. But we need not go in detail into the merits or demerits of this Draft Bill. Enough to say that it is not in accordance with the new spirit ; the nation wants something much better than a mere overhauling of the old conditions. We believe that when the Government conic to frame their drink policy they will not need to be advised by the Trade, but will he astonished at the progress which the country has made in contemplating the State ownership of liquor as the one feasible and immediately possible form of nationalization. As Mr. Thomas very truly says in his letter, the issue is between Prohibition and State Ownership. We have no more difficulty than he has in deciding which of these two offers the better hope of amelioration.
With the best intentions in the world, those who have asked for the unattainable have made little progress. For over sixty years the United Kingdom Alliance has been demanding that the austerity of the few should be imposed upon the many against their will. So far as we can judge, the Alliance is losing rather than gaining ground. Pro- hibition, if it ever comes—and we do not think that it ever will—will come by the voluntary act of the whole nation, by an act like that self-denying amendment which has been added to the American Constitution. But what an appalling amount of misery and disgrace those who pursue a visionary project are willing to pile up meanwhile ! They cry for the moon, and because they cannot have it they will not accept any other of the highly attainable and highly desirable things which could be had to-day or to- morrow. The members of the United Kingdom Alliance and of the National Prohibition Party are like men who have fuddled their brains with the fumes of some strong thing—not drink evidently, but an intoxicating idea— and keep mechanically repeating a phrase. They say that alcohol is so accursed a thing that the State would be corrupted by touching it. They therefore refuse to accept the countless blessings which would be bestowed upon the nation by a permanent and coherent means of control —a great improvement even upon the control which admittedly worked wonders during the war. All the time while making their demand they are blind to the fact that the State has for many years been " touching " the Trade, because it has exalted the Trade into a huge mono- poly and makes a large revenue out of it. It makes this revenue by encouraging the publicans—for this is what really happens, however guiltless Governments may be in their intentions—to press the sale of drink.
The extraordinarily successful working of State owner- ship in the Carlisle district is an illustration of what is possible from State control. The scheme, as Mr. F. W. Chance, the Chairman of the Advisory Committee in the Carlisle area, explained the other day, had entirely " elimi- nated private interest " from the sale of liquor. In his opinion, too, that principle was at the root of all liquor reform. He went on to point out that, in the second place, there had been a great reduction of licences. At the out- break of the war there was one licence for every 354 persons in the area ; now there is one for every 713. With the hearty consent of all decent residents in the area, bad public- houses have been done away with ; and new houses of entertainment have sprung up where families may spend an evening secure against the offensiveness and noise of public-houses where the publicans care for nothing but the sale of alcohol because out of that they make their living. As a matter of fact, the Carlisle experiment has been very successful from a commercial point of view. But this fact is not essential to our argument. If the Drink Trade were not financially successful under State ownership, a great national advantage would nevertheless be gained. Sobriety would be attained ; and even if there were a balance-sheet loss on drink, there would be financial as well as moral gain in many other directions.
State Purchase, with of course proper compensation to all the shareholders in the Drink Trade, is the only true solution. The present system of a vast monopoly out of which the State draws a great revenue is much too dangerous to continue. It means drinking in excess because private salesmen must push their sales—such is the tremendous competition—in order to make a satisfactory living. But drink in excess is absolute poison. Private interest in the sale of this poison must be brought to an end. We shall not remain a great nation if we allow it to continue.
If the State owns the Liquor i Trade it can control the tap ; it can turn the tap on or off n exact accordance with the desires of the people as expressed in regard to the whole nation or in regard to particular districts. What Lord Rosebery said rean7 years ago remains true " Unless the State controls the Liquor Trade, the Liquor Trade will control the State."
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