31 MARCH 1917, Page 3

While dealing with the question of what we may call

voluntary Prohibition—i.e., self-imposed abstention from intoxi- cants during the war—we may note a point in which the strength of the King's example has not been properly appreciated. People some- times speak of the King having given up abstention, having found it impossible, and so forth. A plain narrative of what has happened in this respect is worth putting on record. It proves that the King's example, instead of being weakened by his temporary use of wine, was strengthened, for he showed that his action was based on reason and not upon fanaticism. When the King was recovering from his most serious accident, an accident which very nearly proved fatal, but which again the King would not allow to be written up or made much of, his doctors, against his own desire, insisted that he must for purely medical reasons take a certain small amount of wine every day as a tonic. This the King did, like the sensible man he is. He rightly refused to undertake the responsibility of prescribing for himself—which was the alternative.