DRINK AND ECONOMY.
IT is a threadbare maxim that you cannot—reform a, man by Act of Parliament. It is, of Course, per- fectly true that you cannot, and in a general way we are not in favour of the attempt. To rely entirely upon a set of physical prohibitions is to switch the mind off the right object, which is the formation of character by moral and religious education so that boys and girls may grow up without the desire to ruin themselves and injure their country by their excesses. But this is not to say that you cannot do a very great deal, short of a reformation of character or a change of heart, by making it easy for people to restrain themselves. Weak characters may reach the equivalent of strength if they are deprived of the opportunities of folly. This is specially true of drinking. It le quite unnecessary to argue the question on abstract lines. The man who says that restrictions on the opportunities for drinking have no effact on drunkenness, or on the amount of drink .eonstilinedi makes himself as ridiculous as . the countryman who coinplained that his barometer had no effect upon the:weather. The facts are wholly against him. The proof that tibia wrong is daily being offered to him, and is irrefragable. Take, for example, the report of the results of the " No-Treating " Order in the Metropolitan area. An area which contains 7i millions of people, 6,168 fully licensed houses, 2,373 beerhouses, and 3,508 houses with off-licences provides as good a test as you could want. Here is the official summary of the results :— " There is a consensus of opinion among the superintendents of all divisions that drunkenness gonoraliy, and among' women in particular, has decreased. A marked diminution in the number of women and children standing outside public-louses 'drinking has been noticed, and in many districts the practice has ceased altogether. Police have invariably found fewer people on licensed premises, and a tendency to make shorter stays has been observed. Practically no broaches of the Order have occurrecVand licensees and their servants have shown at all times their willingness to assist tho.police."
The individual. reports from the twenty-one various divisions are all in the same sense. Surely if the results have been so good in the Metropolitan area, the system should be extended without delay all over the country. It is madness not to do so. It is not only the moral effects that are good ; still more important, when we are at war, are the economic effects. But, as our readers will remember, the experience of the Metropolitan area is not singular. Restrictions were imposed in several scheduled areas long before the experiment was tried in Loudon. Everywhere there have been the same fortunate results except in Scotland, where, though the results are good, they are not so good as in England and Wales. Altogether, the figures show 'a, redUction in drunkenness of between thirty and forty per cent, Therefore; we say, let the whole kingdom become a scheduled area without a moment's delay. We feel inclined in exasperation to say to the Govern- ment : " For heaven's sake don't talk to us about economy so long as you refuse to enforce the best, safest, and most powerful means of national economy that can possibly be conceived." There is no wastage in the country at all comparable with the waste on drink. If spirits alone were prohibited, as vodka has been prohibited in Russia, the gain to the wealth of the people would be very great. The gain in industrial efficiency would also be enormous. Mr. Lloyd George was not mistaken when he indicated the " lure of the drink " as the fount and source of half the industrial troubles which brought about the perilous munitions crisis. Russia, having experienced the effects of prohibition, is not at all likely to return after the war to the bonds she formerly imposed upon herself. It has been stated that the amount in the Russian savings-banks, which in December, 1913, was only £70,000, had reached nearly £3,000,000 in December, 1914. The effect of rigorous restriction in Britain—much more of total prohibition—would be still greater. Mr. Lloyd George has hinted several times that it is impos- sible to do anything drastic without the support of public opinion. In our judgment, public opinion would offer no resistance whatever. It is prepared for anything and everything that would make it easier to win the war. What defeated Mr. Lloyd George when ho proposed high taxation was the power of " the trade." " There is the enemy ! " as Gambetta said of Clericalism. A remarkable fact in the working of the recent restric- tive and " No-Treating " Orders is that there have been no complaints. At least we have heard of none. We suspect that hundreds of thousands of men are secretly delighted to be delivered from an expensive and senseless social tyranny. A class of men who are not accustomed to " treat " one another on every chance meeting, and who regard their clubs as places where they naturally pay for their own drinks, but not for those of others, do not perhaps understand quite how far the system of " treating" operates in other classes. In some classes not to offer a drink to a friend is thought to be a sign of a want of geniality, if not an actual meanness. Then the compliment has to be acknowledged and returned. The man who really does not want to drink at all between meals finds himself committed to at least two drinks merely because he has run up against a friend in the street. If he should happen to meet more than one friend, the drinks become multiplied. Everybody stands a drink, or at least' offers one, to every one else. We are certain that there are many thousands of men who bless the "No-Treating " Orders in these days when they are bard put.to it to pay their rent and taxes and educate their children, and who devoutly hope that the old tyranny may never be restored. An indirect proof of this is that, accord- ing to the police reports, there is no difficulty about the working of the Order. It was at first objected that, as a " meal " was not defined, men would go on treating one another by paying at the same time for a sandwich, a sardine, a. piece of bread and cheese, or something that could be described as a " meal " within the law. Nothing of the kind has happened, though you could easily drive a brewer's dray through the wording of the Order. Why is this 2 There can be only one explanation. People want the Order to work. They do not want to evade it. Even the drunkard is on the side of restriction. This may seem to be a paradox, but really it is not. The drunkard in his sober moments wishes to be saved from himself. He is made up of good resolves. When ho is not drunk he looks upon the temperance lecturer who tries to help him as his friend. He is much more tolerant towards preachers and teachers than the moderate drinker, who knows that he is in no need of help and in no danger.
There are a very great number of ordinary people, not at all inclined by temperament to extreme measures, who have been driven by the war to look upon the drink question with new eyes. They have come to recognize the terribly intimate relation between drink and the conduct of war. Disinclined by political conviction towards nearly all forms of State ownership and State control, they nevertheless say : "This business of drink is too much bound up with the efficiency of the nation, with our power to exalt or ruin our country, with our whole moral character, and with our standard of living for the Government simply to look on and decline to control it. Let the control of the State be tightened, not relaxed." That is our view. Never was such a good opportunity as there is now. The characters of too many dependants—women who are receiving generous allowances—are being under- mined. Working men who are drawing larger wages than they ever received in their lives are squandering them instead of setting by a store of savings against the lean times that are certainly coming. Every moral and economic argument tolls for severe restriction. We shall not enter now into the question how the control, the State ownership, or the prohibition for the war should be enacted. We are dealing merely with the broad principle. We only want to urge that if " the trade " cannot be tackled now, it is not likely to be tackled seriously in our day. There is an obvious national reason—a war reason—for action. Even if the whole trade were bought out on generous terms, the price would be cheap in the interests of the nation. There would be no difficulty about throwing thousands of men out of work. The employees of the trade could be absorbed to a man in the Army or in some war service. If the raw material of the trade were not required to be turned into drink, it still would not be wasted ; it would feed pigs and become bacon. Nothing would be lost. Everything would be gained.
We sincerely hope that the Government will do something more, and we hope it may be much more. All the recent evidence is of a. kind to encourage them. There is nothing to discourage them,
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