LIQUOR AND NATIONALIZATION. T HERE are two or three points in
the Liquor Problem upon which the whole country, with the exception of the extreme Temperance people on the one side and the Liquor Trade on the other, is agreed.
(1) The first of these is that total Prohibition—i.e., " going bone dry," in the American phrase—is neither practicable nor desirable in this country. If complete abstention from alcoholic liquors ever comes, it will come, and ought to come, not by Act of Parliament, but by the conversion of the population to the belief that alcohol, even when not taken in excess, is a poisonous and harmful drug, and therefore one to be as much shunned as opium or arsenic. Personally we do not think that day will ever come. Though we believe that alcohol is for the mass of mankind not only unnecessary but, except in small quantities, harmful, and believe also that it is a sedative which slows down men's physical powers instead of increasing their energy, we are inclined to think that mankind will always demand a sedative, even though in growing moderation. (2) The next point is that the majority of sensible people in the country are determined not to go back to the life-war system in regard to the sale of liquor—i.e., to allow the trade in intoxicants to be unaffected by rules and regulations such as those imposed by the Control Board. The immense benefits conferred on the nation by the Control Board are too patent to permit such a relapse to what one can only describe as the negation of civilization. Let any one who does not already realize this take the trouble to compare the statistics, criminal and medical, before and after the establishment of control. They constitute perhaps the most poignant and illuminating set of figures and diagrams in existence. The result of the strict control of intoxi- cants—of forcing moderation in drink upon the people of this country by withdrawing excessive facilities for con- sumption of liquor and by reducing its strength—was at once immensely to diminish what may be described as alcoholic crime. Arrests and prosecutions, not only for being drunk and disorderly, but for the more serious crimes caused by alcoholic excess, greatly decreased in number. Next, what one may call the semi-crimes of the overlaying of children by drunken and half-drunken women, and of suicides, among both men and women, were cut down by something like a half. Finally, the medical returns of alcoholism and delirium tremens suffered the same startling and beneficent diminution. One may add with- out fear of contradiction that no thinking, nay, no decent, man could study these tables without saying : " Come what may, and whatever my own opinion or habits in regard to the taking of alcohol, we will not go back to the pre-war horrors resulting from the misuse of alcohol." Even if responsible people who have never exceeded, and who never by any possibility could become alcohol maniacs or criminals, or commit suicide, or overlay children, should be inconvenienced by control, they must and will suffer that inconvenience gladly if only they know what it has done, and will continue to do, for the morals and health of the population. We should be eternally disgraced as a nation if we were once more to let loose uncontrolled trading in intoxicants upon the country.
(3) A third fact which has emerged from war experience is that, though the State cannot and does not make a very efficient trader in liquor or in anything else, restaurants and public-houses run by public authorities like the Control Board can in essentials give the public what they want. They can also convert bars and drinking-shops into poor men's restaurants, places where the non-alcoholic bever- ages and foods stand out in their proper proportions, and are not the shop-soiled and poor relations of rum, beer, and whisky—the true aristocrats of the Licensed House.
(4) Finally, the people of this country are beginning to realize that the trade in intoxicants is per sc too danger- ous, or, if you will, too attractive, a trade to be left in private hands. When there is a trade, like the trade in intoxi- cants, the undue extension of which may mean an increase of crime and a lowering of the national health, that trade ought not to be in private hands—i.e., in the hands of people who have got to live by it, and therefore are under a perpetual temptation to develop it intensively, a temptation economically rightful but morally reprobate. The creation and stimulation of a demand for, say, safety- razors or Pelmanism is not harmful but beneficial. Such excitation of demand in the case of alcohol is the most terrible of evils. Though moderation may do no harm, excess means national ruin. Yet we have so arranged things in the Liquor Trade that it is only by very skilful trading, by expert salesmanship, that a profit can be made for the manufacturer and the retailer. By our system of licences we have created a great monopoly in the manu- facture and sale of intoxicants. We might have tried to make the "consideration" for that monopoly some fixed profit, and have forbidden or very strictly limited anything in the way of the stimulation of consumption. As it happened, however, we took the other line, perhaps of necessity, and. in consideration of the monopoly taxed. very highly the lucky persons to whom it was entrusted. The practical, though of course unforeseen, result of this was to make it impossible to remain in the Liquor business unless you are very vigilant, very energetic, and very skilful in the matter of sales. Practically the Govern- ment said to the Trade : " You have got to pay to us promptly a very large proportion of what you receive from the public. When, however, you have satisfied the tax-collector, anything more you can squeeze out of the public is yours."
We are aware of course that what we are now going to say will be stoutly denied by the Trade, b,it nevertheless it is true. The Brewers and the Distillers in most cases pay their dividends out of the extra glasses of beer and whisky which had much better not be drunk, but which are demanded by the public very largely owing to the skilful trading and the extraordinarily abundant facilities for drinking supplied by the Trade.—That the Trade is generally unconscious of this fact we fully admit.—In England before control, the one thing that it was always easy to get in any part of the island was a glass of beer or of whisky. You might in some lonely district fail completely to get eggs and bacon or bread and cheese, or even a loaf or a biscuit, but there were very few places so much out of the way as to be "a mile from a drink." Looking at the thing in the abstract, one is forced to admit that the nation was magnificently catered for in the matter of liquor. In many quite small villages there were, and indeed are, three or four public-houses round the village green waiting the choice of the man who wants his glass of beer: Yet in the same village there may be only one place in which to get a postage-stamp, a piece of chocolate, or a pocket-handkerchief. The stimulus of a private profit is in our belief the very best manure for any business. But where we have a trade such as the trade in intoxicants, where we do not want any manure to stimulate demand, where indeed we desire to quiet down rather than to develop, assuredly private profit is a disaster.
We have given above what we may describe as prole- gomena to the subject of Nationalization. Later we shall endeavour to show what is the necessary conclusion from the premisses stated.
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