fefeal or Victory ? 
 
 PUSLiaHIO OniaiNALI-r in eNOLANO 
 
 FOR THE STRENGTH OF BRITAIN MOVEMENT 
 
 First Edition. January. 1917 
 Second Edition. February. 1917 
 
 w^-in— 
 
 Reprinted in the United State* 
 
 By The AMERICAN ISSUE PUBLrSHINO COMPANY 
 
 WESTERVILLK. OHIO
 
 FBOM THE PEESIMM-s OTTICZ 
 TO THE WIVEESXTV HBBAKY
 
 DEFEAToR 
 VICTORY? 
 
 The Strength of Britain Book 
 
 By ARTHUR MEE & 
 J. STUART HOLDEN 
 With an Introduction by 
 C. W. SALEEBY, m. d., f. r. s. e. 
 
 Our doubts are traitors, 
 
 And make us lose the good we oft might win, 
 
 By fearing to attempt. 
 
 Published for the 
 STRENGTH OF BRITAIN MOVEMENT 
 By MORGAN & SCOTT. LIMITED 
 12 Paternoster Buildings, E. C. 
 Second Edition, February, 1917
 
 V 
 
 What This Book Proves 
 
 Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. There is destruc- 
 tion — and madness too — in Europe. This nation, leader of the world in great 
 and solemn causes, Mother of Parliaments and guardian of the freedom of 
 mankind, stands at the parting of the ways. For her it is now, if never before. 
 Defeat or Victory. 
 
 We make no apology, therefore, for the course adopted with this little 
 book. It is still young, only two or three weeks old as these words are 
 written, but already it has a new name and many new things in its pages. 
 The rapid exhaustion of its first 100,000 copies has justified its entering on 
 this second 100,000; and no longer do we think simply of Defeat. We look 
 ahead, we see the stirring of Authority, we feel the throb of a mighty passion 
 rising in the State, and we think of the Victory that is coming — here at home 
 and there abroad. 
 
 It must come. Nero will not fiddle while the British Empire falls, nor 
 can the sinister facts of this solemn hour long remain. The nation has only 
 to know them, and they are being made known. Whether Officialdom will 
 dr no, the truth will burst its bonds and make its way. The day will come 
 when it shall be known to all men in this land that Prohibition of the Drink 
 Trade during the war would have, 
 
 Saved, in Drink expenditure and its results, £1,000,000,000. 
 
 Added a hundred days to our war work; 
 
 Saved over 200,000,000 cubic feet of shipping; 
 
 Set free for war work 100,000 trains of 200 tons; 
 
 Saved the waste of 1,000,000 acres of>land; 
 
 Released man-power enough to lift 60,000,000 tons; 
 
 Enormously relieved the strain on the Red Cross; 
 
 Released thousands of doctors and nurses; 
 
 Saved food to feed the nation 3 months; or 
 
 Saved enough food to feed the Army and Navy all the time. . 
 Those are the stern facts of the situation; they are the facts about the 
 price we have paid for Drink during the War. The nation has only to know 
 them to fling this pro-German trade outside our threatened land, and it is 
 the mission of this book to make them known. 
 
 The Strength of Britain Movement has made this book its own, as part 
 of its Win-the-War Campaign for Prohibition. Will you, who helped to send 
 out the first Hundred Thousand, help to send out One Hundred Thousand 
 more? A. M. 
 
 J. S. H. 
 Strength of Britain Movement, 
 20 Dcnman Street, London, W. 
 
 950283
 
 Strength of Britain Movement 
 
 To Secure the Full Strength of Britain Against Her Enemies and for Re- 
 construction After the War 
 
 The STRENGTH OF BRITAIN MOVEMENT was formed at a meet- 
 ing of business men and others at the Hotel Cecil in June, 1916, when a reso- 
 lution to proceed with the campaign for Prohibition during the war was 
 proposed by Sir Alfred Booth, Bart., Chairman of the Cunard Line, seconded 
 by Mr. Angus Watson, supported by Mr. Thomas Burberry, and carried. 
 
 The Executive Committee appointed at that meeting resolved upon two 
 courses of action: 
 
 1. The promotion of the Strength of Britain Memorial among men and 
 women of Distinction and of representative positions in all departments 
 of life. 
 
 2. The promotion of a newspaper campaign to enlighten public opinion 
 as to facts. 
 
 The remarkable success of the Memorial is described in Chapter 15 of 
 this Book, where the Memorial itself is reproduced. 
 
 The Memorial has behind it an array of the brain-power of the nation 
 that no Government can lightly set aside, but behind this demonstration of 
 the intellectual opinion of the country an effort is being made to organize 
 a national volume of popular opinion through newspaper appeals which reach 
 millions of people; through the issue of a Handbook of facts available at the 
 offices for 5s. per 100, or £2 per 1000; and through the publication of 
 this book. 
 
 The following are the members of the Executive Committee of the 
 Strength of Britain Movement; C. W. Saleeby, M. D., F. R. S. E. (Chair- 
 man); Angus Watson, Henry Randall, H. Stephens, Richardson (Treasurer), 
 W. J. Stewart, Arthur Mee and P. G. A. Smith (Honorary Secretaries). 
 
 All officials are honorary. 
 
 The Strength of Britain Policy, as outlined in its Memorial, is supported 
 by 2448 distinguished citizens of the United Kingdom, including nearly 100 
 Admirals and Generals; 250 Representatives of Munitions, 100 Privy Coun- 
 cilors, Ambassadors and Members of Parliament; 200 Leaders of Industry: 
 500 Magistrates; 500 Doctors; 200 Baronets and Knights; 450 Scientists and 
 Educators; 100 Famous Writers and Artists. 
 
 The Signatories to the Memorial stand for every department of activity 
 in the Kingdom, represent practically all our leading universities and public 
 schools, and embrace the intellectual strength of the country apart from all 
 churches and temperance organizations. 
 
 The Movement is dependent entirely on voluntary contributions; all the 
 money is spent in direct publicity, and an earnest appeal is made for funds 
 to cover the heavy cost of advertising. Please help this Win-the-War move- 
 ment by raising the found to £100,000. 
 
 STRENGTH OF BRITAIN MOVEMENT, LONDON 
 
 20 Denman Street, Piccadilly, W. 
 4
 
 PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION 
 
 This book, of the first edition of which one hundred thousand 
 copies were sold in 20 days, has now been adopted by the Strength 
 of Britain Movement, and is re-issued — as "Defeat or Victory?" for, 
 indeed, its publication as "Defeat?" has brought Victory nearer. 
 
 A few notes may here be permitted in reference to my original 
 introduction which is hereafter reprinted. Its proof of the indeed 
 self-evident truth that the brewer does not produce milk, but 
 destroys it, has now been officially confirmed by the Food Controller, 
 who, in point blank contradiction of his colleague — supposed to be 
 our Food Producer — now demands a reduction of 30 per cent, in the 
 destruction of food by brewing, in order, he tells us, to favor the 
 production of meat and milk. In this the Committee of the Royal 
 Society now confirms him. 
 
 But if a 30 per cent reduction of the present output of beer will 
 saVe food at the rate of more than 300,000 tons per annum, as Lord 
 Davenport tells us, he and the Government are clearly self-im- 
 pugned of gambling with the German submarines, the Fate of Free- 
 dom being the stake, by permitting 70 per cent of this infamous and 
 colossal destruction of food to continue. It is for the nation to de- 
 cide whether such sport shall go on, scarcely distinguishable from 
 Imperial treachery and suicide. 
 
 Our food supply is at this hour being also impaired by the con- 
 tinued use of freight space in our ships for the import of food which 
 the brewers will destroy; whisky is yet distilled, though we have 
 enough for several years' consumption ; and Mr. Prothero, who can- 
 not be unaware that hops are not a food, but a narcotic drug — of all 
 things to grow now — has surpassed himself. At Maidstone on Feb- 
 ruary I — the day inaugurating Germany's last cast against our food 
 — he stated our hop-gardens to be 31,000 acres, and depreciated the 
 growth of food thereon, saying that the crop would only feed the 
 nation for a day and a half. A few minutes later he called upon 
 farmers "to grow every pound of bread in the country that was 
 possible." A Minister for the growth of food who has alarmed and 
 displeased everyone but the food-destroyers, with an obvious con- 
 tradiction of the truth which the Food Controller has now stated, 
 and who contrives in one speech to call for every pound of bread 
 and to say that bread for 46,000.000 people for a day and a half does 
 not matter — what has the Strength of Britain to hope from him? As 
 much or as little, one fancies, as from politicians who ask for 
 economy and contributions to the War Loan but who never men- 
 tion drink and have evidently never heard of the King's Pledge. It 
 
 5
 
 was Lord Kitchener who asked the nation to give up drinking in 
 order to help the War Loans, but he was only an honest man, with 
 no secret masters, the "vendors of death," as Ruskin called them, to 
 serve. 
 
 The Government at this tremendous hour knows that there is 
 no answer to the demand of the Strength of Britain Movement, 
 which is supported by millions of our imperial fellow-citizens 
 throughout the world. Is it free and brave enough to do its urgent 
 and palpable duty? Or are the citizens of the Empire, from our 
 Memorialists to the humblest Tommy and the latest recruit of the 
 Salvation Army, to be counted brave and loyal without avail because 
 the King's Government was venal or afraid? 
 
 February lo, 1917. C. W. S.
 
 INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST HUNDRED THOUSAND 
 
 If Sir Victor Horsley had been alive, doubtless he would have 
 been asked to write an introduction to this splendid little book. The 
 greatest surgeon of the century left ease and profit to die for Free- 
 dom's Trustees in Mesopotamia, whence one of his last letters was 
 a protest which is quoted in its place hereafter. For some state- 
 ments of a scientific kind our authors came to me in aid of their book. 
 But all that is already available, for a shilling, in the complete new 
 1915 edition of Sir Victor's and Dr. Mary Sturge's "Alcohol and the 
 Human Body" with its special chapters directed to our experience 
 in this war. To them the reader may be referred for the citation 
 of the evidence when he reads many of the following pages. 
 
 As regards the influence of alcohol, used as a pro-German poison 
 in the Army, let there here be only noted that glorious fight, Y. M. 
 C. A. versus Wet Canteen, the longest and most momentous battle 
 of the war. which has been waged with such glorious vigor by Chris- 
 tian and Jew, Anglican, Roman Catholic, Nonconformist, Salva- 
 tionist, and Agnostic, under the aegis of that most truly Christian 
 Association on the earth. 
 
 But the appeal of this book is to the nation; our authors know 
 well that public opinion rules the land, and that it need only say for 
 the Prohibition of this accursed destro3^er of our manhood, our food, 
 and our future. To this end Mr. Mee calls upon the strength of 
 Britain as an honorary secretary of the movement he has named in 
 that fine phrase, and of which, as one interested in public health, the 
 basis of all efficiency, I have the honor to be Chairman. From our 
 new Government — which would not be in being had not surrender 
 to alcohol paved the way for its predecessor's failure and fall — the 
 Strength of Britain Movement now awaits an answer to the most 
 wonderful and significant memorial of its kind in history. 
 
 No answer but one would appear to be possible, but the issue 
 depends on whether this Government is, or is not, the first in our 
 history that could defy the cannibal trade, which has dictated its 
 will to all Governments hitherto; and that, in its turn, depends upon 
 the people. 
 
 We may have what we please. Mr. Lloyd George demands for 
 food "every yard" that can grow it. The Garden of England con- 
 tains at this moment 30,000 acres of admirable soil, amply ma- 
 nured, that will grow food at last, if we please, instead of bitter rub- 
 bish as hitherto. If the Government now allows hops to be grown 
 there, we shall know that when the teetotal Prime Minister of our 
 teetotal King, in the crisis of our history, said "every yard," he 
 
 7
 
 meant every yard the brewers do not want for their already swollen 
 pockets and our destruction. 
 
 The problem of the distiller is solved. We need all the alcohol 
 we can get for victory; it would seem obvious that the Committee 
 now trying to secure it would begin by recommending the Prohibi- 
 tion of alcohol for defeat. 
 
 But the case of the" brewers is not so simple. They have a friend 
 in a high place, who, in a speech containing the greatest compHment 
 to the German Navy and the greatest insult to our own yet heard 
 (that we are a "Beleaguered city") went out of his way to utter the 
 obvious nonsense, which would not deceive one of the infants so 
 mortally concerned with it — that the brewer "produces milk." Cer- 
 tain food produced by the farmer having been destroyed by the 
 brewer, the remainder may feed cows ; and this our new Minister of 
 Agriculture interprets as signifying that the brewer "produces milk." 
 
 The matter is a serious one. The only essential use of milk is 
 for the infants whom their mothers cannot or will not feed. It 
 should be known to Mr. Prothero that the use of brewers' grains is 
 forbidden to the farmers who supply milk to Copenhagen, the capi- 
 tal city of the world's exemplar in dairy farming; that these grains 
 are condemned by our best medical authority on the production of 
 milk for the infant as involving it in grave dangers; and that en- 
 lightened Health Boards all over the world forbid the use of brewers' 
 grains owing to their notorious consequences for the milk, except 
 when moderately used under conditions which in practice are never 
 fulfilled. 
 
 The brewer and the distiller are destroyers of food, nothing 
 more and nothing less. Except by the destruction of carbohydrate 
 foods, starch and sugar, they cannot make alcohol. If the alcohol 
 be used for its thousand life-serving purposes, in peace or in war, the 
 destruction of food not still more essential to life is justified ; other- 
 wise it is waste and worse, the turning of treasure into trash, of 
 food into poison. 
 
 These are simple chemical truths which we should all know had 
 we not been brought up under an educational system which calls 
 chemistry — the very architect of civilization — by the name of 
 "stinks." But for this we should not be deceived when the brewers 
 tell us, for instance, that they use only six per cent of the nation's 
 sugar, less than goes into non-intoxicating drinks. The sugar in ■ 
 non-alcoholic drinks, as in tea or fruit, is used; it burns in the heart 
 and other muscles, and maintains the life. The sugar the brewer 
 takes he destroys so that no man can use it. Further, the brewer 
 does not mention the colossal quantities of starch he uses; but 
 
 8
 
 starch and sugar are simply two forms of the same thing, and all the 
 starch the brewer destroys is food as such, as is the sugar into which 
 it can at any time be turned. These commonplaces of elementary 
 science disputed by no one ; in all the trade replies to these pages not 
 one of our food destroyers will challenge this paragraph. 
 
 The value of alcohol as a motor, illuminant, source of blessed 
 drugs, and for a thousand industrial uses furnishes the answer to the 
 pietistic section of the alcoholic party who, with the characteristic 
 cunning of the feeble-minded, say that, since God made alcohol, 
 man should swallow it. The argument would apply to petrol or 
 prussic acid. Whatever our concepts may be of God, assuredly He 
 is not mocked by arguments as ignorant or dishonest as these. 
 
 To this nation has now come the moment to decide. Whatever 
 our fate, at least it will stand on the national record that there were 
 not a few men and women in Britain who saw the Truth when it 
 was as clear as the sun at high noon, and who knew and proclaimed 
 that the Truth alone could keep us free. 
 
 C. W. SALEEBY.
 
 » CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Preface to the New Edition 5 
 
 I, The Great Betrayal 11 
 
 II. The Tragedy of Man-Power 16 
 
 III. The Soldier's Peril ,. 23 
 
 IV. The Menace to the Empire 31 
 
 V. Let Us Call the Witnesses 37 . 
 
 VI. The Destruction of Food 39 
 
 VII. The Lost Hundred Days 44 
 
 VIII. Interfering With the Navy 48 
 
 IX. Our Wasted Millions 51 
 
 X. Ships, Docks and Trains 53 
 
 XL Winning and Losing 54 
 
 XII. Fooling With the Enemy 61 
 
 XIII, The Mobilization of Alcohol 70 
 
 XIV. The Only Way -jz 
 
 XV. The Strength of Britain Speaks 75 
 
 Witpithe Strength of Britain Memorial 
 
 XVI. What is to be DoneF 81 
 
 The Stern Facts 87
 
 CHAPTER I 
 THE GREAT BETRAYAL 
 
 THERE does not beat a human heart in Britain, worthy of 
 the freedom it enjoys, that does not throb with pain at the 
 thought that perhaps we may be beaten. In all the range 
 of human thought, in all the emotions that stir the life of 
 man, is nothing more terrible than the thought that perhaps, by 
 some unspeakable calamity, this land of Drake and Nelson May 
 suffer defeat. 
 
 It cannot be. It shall not be. We dare not think of it, and the 
 word will not come to our lips. There is not in these islands a soul so 
 dead that he dare talk of our defeat. 
 
 And yet there is not in these islands a man with mind so dead . 
 that he does not see what all the world can see. We stand confronted 
 with all the powers of scientific deviltry. All Europe rocks and reels. 
 From morning to night, from night till morning, the manhood of 
 the nations is marching to its grave. Not for the first time in this 
 island's story, afflicted Europe looks to her for a refuge and a 
 strength in time of trouble. And Europe has not looked in vain, for 
 this island has done wonders. She has done wonders that we Httle 
 thought possible. But the things she has not done, the great and 
 noble things that might have kept us company on our redeeming 
 way — ah! what shall we say of these? 
 
 We must say of them that this country has deprived herself of 
 mighty powers of victory; that while her young men have gone 
 forth to wounds and death, we at home have done less than our part. 
 For them there were the trenches and the German guns ; for us there 
 is Britain still— still the warm fireside, the well-furnished table, and 
 all that most of us want. The sacrifice of war has yet to come for us 
 at home. Out there men bear the burden and the agony; here we 
 read of it and are stirred and thrilled, yet never are we thrilled to 
 supreme sacrifice. There men are true till death for Britain's sake; 
 but Britain is not true in life and ease. 
 
 It is time, it is surely more than time, that it was said. It is 
 time, surely, with the war far into its third year, that we took our 
 part in it at home. The power of a nation is not in its materials. 
 Behind its guns and shells, behind its wealth and visible powers, is 
 the soul of the people, without which all is in vain. And the soul of 
 our people, deeply stirred in that far-off autumn of 1914, has lost 
 
 11
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 touch with those great heights it reached when the Prime Minister 
 led us to beheve that no sacrifice was too great with freedom and 
 honor at stake. 
 
 We believed it then ; our men went out believing it ; they went to 
 their graves believing it. But it is not true. We have lost our belief 
 in sacrifice. We have believed we could pull through without it. 
 What has happened is that the Government of this country, in the 
 gravest crisis with which we were ever confronted, declared to our 
 people that, whatever they might have said on our platforms, what- 
 ever glowing phrases they sent ringing round the world from the 
 Guildhall, the supreme act of sacrifice we called for abroad was not 
 called for at home. It is pitifully true, and in it lies the secret of the 
 lengthening war. 
 
 The war goes on, and will go on, because we have not paid the 
 price of victory. We are shirkers yet. 
 
 Let us use plain words. There is a canker in the life of Britain. 
 As a strong man throws off poisons, so do nations in their strength ; 
 but the time comes when poisons have their way. And so the time 
 came to Europe. Britain, France, and Russia, when the war burst 
 suddenly upon Europe, had each its great internal problem to be 
 solved. Within a few days Russia made her choice. Within a few 
 weeks France had followed her. A little longer and Britain, too, was 
 face to face with the peril her allies had put away from them. 
 
 The Prussian barbarians were pressing on, but the great British 
 power moved slowly. We were short of guns and men, and we were 
 short from a cause that was easily controllable. It was not that our 
 ships could not bring in the raw materials across the sea ; it was not 
 that the gates of the world were closed against us; it was not that 
 the war conditions made it difficult for our workshops to rise to the 
 glorious part that fell to them in saving Europe : it was simply that 
 an enemy within our gates, an ancient foe of ours, had its brake on 
 Britain all the time. It was nothing new, except that the brake was 
 pressing more and more upon our wheels; but those who sleep in 
 peace wake up in war, and we found in this hour of our trial what 
 our drink trade really means. We found that while the Prohibition 
 workshops of America poured out shells and guns for us in quantities 
 never known before, the workshops of this country, with an enervat- 
 ing stream of alcohol forever running through them, were doing 
 less than usual. 
 
 It was a ghastly discovery for those who had been blind so long, 
 for it meant that this great trade, existing on the social pleasures of 
 our people, stood in our path as we set out to fight once more the 
 
 12
 
 THE GREAT BETRAYAL 
 
 fight that WelHngton and Nelson fought. It meant that this trade, 
 serving no other purpose in the world than to gratify acquired appe- 
 tites, had become an open menace to us all ; it meant that in the face 
 of this grave crisis that involved all Europe there arose in Britain a 
 strangling force that broke our ancient power. We were not to 
 throw our whole weight in the scale, but such a weight as we had 
 left when a private trade had done with us. The Bill of Rights is 
 there for all mankind to read, and it says that the Government of a 
 country is constituted for the "protection, safety, and happiness of 
 the people, and not for the profit or private interests of any class of 
 men." That would seem an adequate indictment of a private trade 
 which the King himself declares to have imperiled the supplies of 
 our Armies and our Fleet, and to have prolonged the war. And there 
 we stood, when the war was six months old. 
 
 This truth it was that clapped like thunder through the State — 
 that this nation, mother of freedom and guardian of the liberties of 
 the human race, was on the edge of a precipice: we were looking 
 down in the abyss, and we were fooling with drink. 
 
 Will it be believed, we may wonder, when the historian comes 
 to write the story of these times, that in the spring of 191 5 the des- 
 tinies of Britain were in the hands of men who saw these things, 
 who knew them well, who were warned — not once nor twice, but 
 many times — that our armies. an-d fleets were in peril through drink, 
 but who listened to the warnings and did nothing. Will it be be- 
 lieved that, though the King himself was moved to shame and indig- 
 nation by these revelations, though he banished alcohol from all his 
 palaces, though the Minister for War did the same in the interests 
 of the Army, though the Chancellor of the Exchequer did the same 
 in the interests of our national finance, though the Primate led the 
 way for the Church, though the Government of Nova Scotia did the 
 same in the interests of the Empire, the Government of this ct)untry 
 took little notice, and the House of Commons mocked at it and 
 laughed it all to scorn? We rnay predict that it will hardly be be- 
 lieved ; but one thing is certain — the historian will see in that the 
 explanation of that public indifference which for two years now has 
 been our peril, and of that reluctance for sacrifice at home which 
 must break the heart of those abroad. 
 
 For it is clear as the noonday sun, as plain as the murder of 
 Belgium, what happened when the Government of this country 
 refused to follow the King to victory. The King expected the Prohi- 
 bition of alcohol; Mr. Lloyd George meant that it should come; 
 Lord Kitchener had already anticipated both ; and the fact which 
 
 13
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 moved them all was the peril in which the nation stood from this 
 private trade. But when, after all that had been said, the Govern- 
 ment went on drinking, the argument in the nation was perfectly 
 clear. If the King was right, if it was really true that drink had 
 kept back guns and shells and prolonged the war, no Government 
 on this earth dare have let that thing go on. It was inconceivable 
 that a Government could so betray our country and our Allies in the 
 cause of human freedom ; and so the King and Lord Kitchener and 
 Mr. Lloyd George and their advisers must all have been wrong. 
 
 It must be said that the argument is sound, and only one thing 
 more is there to say concerning it — that upon that Government 
 there rests, in face of the world and in the face of history, the re- 
 sponsibility of the gravest betrayal of our people in all our annals. 
 That Government could have sown such seed as would have borne 
 fruit like unto a millennium ; it could have broken the habits of weak- 
 ness that have so long endangered this country, and implanted new 
 habits of strength ; it could have speeded up the war, hastened vic- 
 tory, and saved the lives and limbs of hundreds of thousands of men ; 
 and it could have laid the broad foundations of a British Kingdom of 
 such power as Drake and Nelson never dreamed of, for we should 
 have arrived at the Great Peace with our enemy without and our 
 enemy within both under our feet forever. A little model for the 
 mighty world this realm, this England, would have been indeed. 
 
 But no, the opportunity was thrown away. The House of Com- 
 mons kept open its bars defiantly, that our elected rulers could leave 
 the Council Chamber at any hour they pleased, to patronize, at the 
 bars of Parliament, this trade that the King had banished from his 
 house. We have seen how things work in war ; it is not enough, un- 
 happily, to ask a nation to give up this or that. Voluntaryism fails. 
 There are not enough people in any nation who love the nation better 
 than themselves ; there are not enough people in any country who 
 love truth better than their selfish interests. We must jnit a man on 
 his oath in a court of law, we must call for witnesses of this or that. 
 It was not enough to ask that our factories should make as many 
 shells as possible; it was not enough to ask that people should give 
 up buying motor-cars, or using petrol for pleasure, or gambling at 
 race meetings ; it was not enough to ask that every able man should 
 offer his life for his country. Slowly but surely compulsion came in 
 such things — how slowly, and how bitterly our army must h-ave 
 paid for it, we know full well. But there was no compulsion — there 
 was not even a Government's encouragement and example — for the 
 greatest need of all, for the sacrifice that would have cost a little 
 
 14
 
 THE GREAT BETRAYAL 
 
 pleasure and put our nation at full strength against her foes. This 
 we could please ourselves about, for, as for the Government, had it 
 not told us that it did not matter? 
 
 That Government of the Great Betrayal, and the great hour that 
 came to it, have gone, but the war is with us still, and we are not at 
 the end. The bold decision that would have made the Government 
 immortal in the story of the world was not made. The Government 
 sat down to muddle through as Governments have done before. It 
 made up its mind that it could face the gravest danger in which 
 Britain ever stood with less than her full strength; it made up its 
 mind that, as Francis Drake co'uld go on bowling and beat the Span- 
 iards, so it could go on drinking and beat the Germans too. By their 
 fruits ye shall know them. Sir Francis Drake won his game of 
 bowls and beat the Spaniards; this British Government went on 
 drinking and did not beat the Germans. What it did was to depress 
 the people, to put a millstone round the necks of those who fought 
 for greater strength, to fill with a sense of despair all those who 
 hoped we were in earnest, to dim that noble vision with which we 
 all set out in 1914 on our great journey to the final peace and freedom 
 of the world. 
 
 The greatest efifort ever made to save us from our greatest foe 
 had failed. One would have thought that Lord Kitchener. Mr. Lloyd 
 George, and the King stood for the strength of Britain in those days, 
 and all three stood for Prohibition. They knew the facts. They 
 knew that we were fighting two great wars ; they knew that Germany 
 was pressing on, and that her agents in this country, these hundred 
 thousand fortresses of weakness set up in all our streets, were worth 
 to the Kaiser many divisions of troops. The evidence was there 
 before them ; it is written in plain words by the Government's own 
 advisers, by men who had never said a public word for temperance 
 in all their lives, but who saw the enemy before them and did their 
 duty bv letting the nation know that it was there. They spoke in 
 vain ; we had lost the great moral battle of Downing Street. The 
 three strong men to whom we looked to win the foreign war had lost 
 the war at home, and it was a bad omen. Both here and out in 
 France things went from bad to worse. 
 
 Nearlv two years have passed since then, and how does it stand 
 with Britain? We stand at the parting of the ways once more; the 
 power that guides our destinies has brought us round once more to 
 the Gate of Opportunity; the golden moment has come back again. 
 We can put on the whole armour of Britain ; we can rise — not in 
 courage, but in willingness of sacrifice — to the height of those who 
 
 IS
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 die for us. We can quit ourselves like a great nation and be worthy 
 of our living and our dead ; or we can go on drinking and hang our 
 heads in shame as we walk through France and Russia in the years 
 to come. 
 
 The hour is striking, and the nation waits. 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE TRAGEDY OF MAN-POWER 
 
 Is there, in all the story of this war and the years of our life that 
 led up to it, anything more appalling than the man-power tragedy 
 of the British people? 
 
 For a generation Germany had been preparing the blow that has 
 fallen on Europe. With all the resources of science at her hand she 
 stalked across Europe like a wolf in sheep's clothing. With the 
 powers she drew from the Electric Age she allied the morals of the 
 Age of Stone. 
 
 But what shall we say of our doings in these fifty years since 
 Prussia first became the troubler of the world? We have seen her 
 power grow up in Central Europe, and let us tell the truth— we have 
 allowed an enemy to sow simultaneously in our own country the 
 seeds of a hostile power that were to bear their full fruit when the 
 German blow fell. The drink trade in these fifty years has deprived 
 this country of man-power equivalent to the whole of the British 
 Army under arms. 
 
 It could be shown that if all the lives that have been broken 
 and destroyed by drink in these islands had been free from drink 
 and had pursued their normal way, the population of this country 
 would have been many millions nearer to that of Germany ; our man- 
 hood would have been stronger and cleaner and more enduring. 
 There would have been millions of boys coming up who, thanks to 
 drink, have not been born. When we think of slums, of disease and 
 poverty and all the miseries the poor are heir to, we think of a trag- 
 edy of life that is nine-tenths drink. As the plague of flies exists and 
 breeds in all the elements of decay, so the plague of drink exists and 
 thrives in all the elements of degeneration and defeat. Drink cuts 
 down life as a knife cuts chafif, and we count in millions the loss of 
 population that is due to drink in these fifty years while Prussia has 
 been building up her power. 
 
 If you would know how we destroy our children, there is a little 
 war book that will tell you : it is Dr. Norman Maclean's noble book, 
 
 16
 
 THE TRAGEDY OF MAN-POWER 
 
 "Stand Up, Ye Dead." You can read it in an hour or two, and you 
 will never forget it. Unless you have the heart of a Kaiser, it must 
 thrill you through and through. You will learn from it that we 
 sacrifice one-third of our possible growth of population, following in 
 the way of France, which cries in vain today for her lost men. There 
 are other causes than drink for these things, but there is tragic 
 meaning in the words of one of our great Medical Officers of Health, 
 Dr. Millard of Leicester, who says that were he offered the abolition 
 of drink alone, or of all the other enemies of public health put to- 
 gether, he would choose the abolition of drink. And drink does 
 more than rob us of our children ; it robs us of the health of hosts 
 of those it leaves alive. It steals the capital strength of a human 
 being before it comes into the world; it brings him into life maimed 
 and crippled, with a millstone round his neck. The very atmosphere 
 of alcohol is harmful to a child. Children subject to its influence are 
 checked in their growth, and the structure of their brains can never 
 reach perfection. 
 
 Let us look at a few cases out of many thousands and see what 
 drink is doing with these little ones that come into the world and 
 might be heroes. One of them was born of a drinking mother and it 
 ailed, as the child of a drinking mother will. She took it to a public- 
 house and stood there drinking, and as she stood it died, but the 
 mother went on drinking. The other case concerns a family of eight, 
 living in one room. It is one of the homes the British Army and the 
 British Fleet are fighting for. The eldest boy was 21, and he lay the 
 other day on the only bed in the only room. He was dying of con- 
 sumption, but that night he was put on the floor, for the bed was 
 wanted for the mother and the little one that was to be born. Then 
 the mother and the baby left the bed for the boy to die in. He was 
 gone in a day or two, and soon the mother, the little baby, and an- 
 other girl followed him to the grave, a happier place than their 
 English home. There was a man still left who called himself a 
 husband and father, and he celebrated their deaths by getting drunk. 
 There is a country still left, and it calls itself great, but it is the slave 
 of a devilish trade which does things like this and dares to claim the 
 right to live as if it were an honest thing and to be bought out. 
 
 We call ourselves a great country, but for all these years a 
 private trade has grown rich by sapping our foundations. We call 
 ourselves the pioneers of health, but all these years a private trade 
 has sown broadcast in our land the seeds of weakness and disease. 
 We call ourselves lovers of children, but all these years we have tol- 
 erated a trade that kills them, and we send the men who bolster up 
 
 • 17
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 that trade, not to prison or the gallows, but to the House of Com- 
 mons and the House of Lords. We think ourselves a little model 
 to the mighty world, but it is a vain conceit. Unto whom much is 
 given, of him shall much be required-; and in the light of the knowl- 
 edge in our libraries the existence of the drink trade in this country 
 is a thing that should make us very careful what we say when we 
 speak of men who murder babies from their Zeppelins. 
 
 We, too, have our Count Zeppelins ; they throw the ugly shadow 
 of their instruments of death over all we do in peace and war. In 
 war this social Zeppelin has brought us nearer to defeat than Na- 
 poleon ever could; in peace this Zeppelin drops its bombs of death 
 in every town and hamlet through this land. We feel a thrill of hate, 
 the best of us, as we see a German Zeppelin, creeping like a devil 
 among the stars; but we may hope to live to see the day when every 
 decent man who loves this country will feel a thrill of shame at the 
 thought of what this land was like before Prohibition made it clean. 
 We have to grow as ashamed of a public-house as of a baby-farm. 
 We have to make a constituency ashamed of giving up its place in 
 Parliament to a representative of this foe that kills our children. We 
 are fighting the forces of barbarism in Europe, but there is a force 
 of barbarism in the midst of the United Kingdom that drags the 
 nation down as if a millstone hung about its neck, and everywhere 
 it rises up against us ; for every stone that is laid in the slow building- 
 up of the British Millennium is hindered and weakened by this enemy 
 within our own gates. 
 
 We are fighting for liberty, and in the name of that same liberty 
 we license in this country a thing more terrible than a German sub- 
 marine, destroying more lives, and wrecking more homes, and 
 spreading more sorrow in every week of peace than any German 
 submarine in any year of war. The Titanic goes down with its 
 human freight, by accident or neglect, and the whole world throbs 
 with grief ; the Lusitania goes down by the act of an assassin, and 
 the whole world is stricken with horror." But if a Titanic or a Lusi- 
 tania were sunk each week it would not match, in tragic inhumanity, 
 the blow struck by a cruel trade at the heart of our Motherland now. 
 
 The most terrible thing about this British social Zeppelin is 
 not that it betrayed our heroes in the trenches, is not that it sold their 
 lives for gold ; truly the terrible thing about this trade is that it fouls 
 the very stream of life. We are the trustees of the future; as we 
 hand it down the life of ages to come will be. All posterity sleeps 
 in the bodies of those who live on earth today, all the posterity of 
 the United Kingdom is subject to us now. It is not a selfish cause 
 
 18
 
 THE TRAGEDY OF MAN-POWER 
 
 for which we fight. We fight to destroy the reptile power of Europe, 
 but we fight for the everlasting future of this land ; we fight the fight 
 that Drake and Cromwell and Nelson fought; we fight to keep the 
 man-power of this nation pure and noble and strong for whatever 
 enemies shall come when there are no more Prussias to conquer. 
 
 We sit on the banks of Time, and the river of life glides past, 
 until we cross the bar, but there are others coming on, and they are 
 what we make them. We create for them the environment in which 
 they shall live; we put into their bodies the seed that determines the 
 way they shall go. Shall life be worth living for them? Shall the 
 fruit be bitter' or sweet? 
 
 The terrible truth is that we sow, with our eyes wide open and 
 with the full knowledge of the State, the seeds of bitterness for mil- 
 lions of little children. We think it horrible and barbarous when 
 Germans poison wells and rivers ; but what shall we say of Britons 
 who poison life itself for little children yet unborn ! 
 
 Perplexed with all our social problems ; surrounded with slums, 
 with prisons and hospitals with half-made men, and rickety and 
 stunted children, we endow a private trade to buy from the State the 
 right to hand on these things to the future. Is it nothing to us that 
 this social Zeppelin of ours, not content to have stolen our man- 
 power in the past, not content to imperil our land today, not content 
 to turn the happiness of millions into misery through all the years 
 they live, saps the very foimdations of our future and writes across 
 the entrance of this world, for millions of children who come through 
 its gates — All hope abandon, ye who enter here. That is what it 
 means when science tells us that the evils of alcohol are not con- 
 fined to the man who drinks it for his pleasure, but are carried on to 
 the first and third generation. So you may take your pleasure now, 
 and in a hundred years some little child may pay for it in misery, and 
 you will not be there to care. 
 
 And in these days this trade goes on. There is to be seen in 
 our towns and cities, as these words are being written, the most 
 appalling spectacle of woe that ever eyes can look upon. The pave- 
 ments in our streets are made impassable by long queues people, 
 regulated by police waiting their turn outside the whisky-shops. "I 
 wish I could not get it," cried one poor woman bitterly; and another, 
 fresh from prison, was heard to bewail. "They say we shan't be able 
 to get it after Christmas." And hidden from the streets, behind 
 these brick walls that hide the tragedy of the drink-ruined homes of 
 England, every daily paper tells us what is happening. 
 
 You have only to step out of doors, or pick up a paper, to see 
 
 19
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 the battlefields of drink. Dozens of colonial troops, Canadians and 
 Australians, were figthing a day or two ago — not in France, but 
 close by Westminster; not the Germans, but one another; and they 
 went on fighting till one at least was mortally wounded. Forty-five 
 women went out from Shefiield for a ride in wagonettes, and a police 
 officer declared that in 25 years of police life among miners he had 
 never seen such a drunken party. The wagonettes were packed 
 with boxes of beer, and not a woman was sober. At a fire in a Not- 
 tingham factory a drunken sailor sat astride the burning roof, and 
 it took three firemen, at the peril of their lives, to stop him jumping 
 into the flames below. At Preston the wife of an army officer was 
 charged with neglecting six children, the youngest lately born, the 
 oldest ten. The house and the children were in a filthy state, and 
 the wife lay drunk with two of her friends. On the table was half 
 a bottle of rum and two bottles of stout ; in one day she had bought 
 three quarts of rum, and of £27 received from the army she spent 
 in three weeks £22. An army doctor had told of two cases lately 
 received at Claybury Asylum, one of a soldier's wife who wasted 
 her allowance, neglected her children, and drank herself insane; the 
 other of a man who used to pay income-tax, whom drink has lately 
 driven to this asylum as a pauper lunatic. 
 
 They were not isolated cases. Of 68 women who have been 
 Vuined by drink during the war, 21 were soldiers' wives, 23 were 
 laborers' wives, 20 were mine-sweepers' widows and wives, and four 
 were soldiers' widows. 
 
 So, while our war factories do the best they can with the drink 
 brake on, these factories of madness and ruin and sin work at full 
 speed with hardly a brake at all drawing their heavy tribute from 
 the poor. Such things our poor women buy with the money they 
 should save for reconstruction, but all is well: the coronets glitter 
 in the House of Lords. What a story it would make, the story of 
 the great war fortunes pi this trade ! It is not long since the man- 
 aging director of Allsopps regretted that there was not more beer 
 available in the trenches; but the profits of Allsopps were doubled 
 last year and were doubled the year before, so that it is not the 
 brewers who will go to the dogs. They go from wealth to wealth; 
 they ride in their motor-cars for all the world as if they were un- 
 ashamed ; and outside our public houses, if you stand for an hour or 
 two and watch their poor victims, the bitter scenes will stagger you. 
 In one hour nearly 1,500 men and 2,000 women went into four public 
 houses in London ; into one public house at London Bridge there 
 went in one hour on a Sunday 344 men, 235 women, and 
 
 20
 
 THE TRAGEDY OF MAN-POWER 
 
 300 soldiers and sailors. Into our public houses there 
 went in one hour 879 women, 1,205 "len and 697 soldiers. Of 5,000 
 troops g^iven leave from one barracks, most of them abstainers, 659 
 came back drunk. Two drunken soldiers were wheeled in barrows 
 to a train in Glasgow, and the Bishop of Liverpool tells usthat, as he 
 watched a hideous drunken sight at a station, an officer leaving for 
 the Front turned round and said, "What a disgusting sight! If 
 these men were at the Front they would be shot." But they were 
 not at the Front ; they were at home, where we drink as usual. 
 
 What news do they get from home, these men in the trenches? 
 Pitiful enough it is sometimes. Here is a Christmas story of a cor- 
 poral who was fighting on the Somme not long ago, but lies in a 
 prison cell today. His wife was one of the thousands of wives who 
 have gone astray in this Age of Drink, and this poor hero, hearing of 
 it, wrote to the Chief Constable of his town. "What have I to look 
 forward to at the end of the war?" He wrote: "Nothing, only sor- 
 row — that is, if I live to come home. I think it will drive me mad." 
 He did come home, and he strangled his wife ; and this man, whom 
 his officer called the very best type of soldier, is with the criminals in 
 gaol today instead of with the heroes on the Somme. Such a man, 
 with such a character, ought not to be with criminals, said the Judge; 
 and we shall all agree. It is somebody else who should be there. 
 
 Take up yesterday's paper, or today's, or tomorrow's, and your 
 heart will sink as you think one moment of the glory we are fighting 
 for, and the next moment of the sickening horrors that exist at home. 
 In a public-house in Birmingham, in one half-hour, over 200 were 
 seen to enter a bar, all in their teens, and seven were drunk. Two 
 girls of 16 and 17, working on munitions, walked drunk into an ex- 
 plosive works in a Midland town and placed the lives of the workers 
 there in jeopardy. 
 
 You do not like to read of such things, but this is the price we 
 pay for drink. A member of Parliament was appealing for recruits, 
 and a young man asked if the Government would look after his wife 
 and children. The M. P. assured him, and the young man enlisted. 
 One day he was wounded, and the time came when he saw his home 
 again. He saw what he saw there, and he went to the House of 
 Commons and called out the M. P. and he refused to shake hands 
 with him because, while he had been fighting to make good a broken 
 word, the Government had broken its word to him, and he had come 
 back wounded to find his home broken up and his wife a drunkard. 
 He had fought to keep the Germans back, but the enemy greater 
 than Germanv had destroyed his home. "You should have made 
 
 21
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 trenches between our homes and the public-house," he told the 
 M. P.; and that M. P. has never listened to wiser words. 
 
 So we drink away our strength ; so we throw away our powers of 
 victory and our very source of life. There goes out from these is- 
 lands, all round the British Empire, a precious stream of life that 
 has its source beyond the Tweed ; but have you thought of the price 
 we pay for drink in Scotland now? Scotland is ready, and more 
 than ready, for Prohibition ; a hundred elected public bodies and 700 
 churches and societies have begged it from the Government almost 
 on their knees. Glasgow City Council, and her licensing magistrates, 
 have begged for it again and again ;' but the Government will not 
 give it them, and the things that happen in Scotland are enough to 
 break the heart of man. The crime of drink up there is bad enough in 
 time of peace. Six hundred thousand people in Glasgow live with 
 only room enough for animals ; more than half the population have 
 not room to live a decent life. The Medical Officer of Health says 
 there are over ten thousand houses in Glasgow unfit for habitation 
 and he stands for total Prohibition of the greatest cause of all this 
 sickening misery. But day by day and night by night this trade 
 pours its stuflf of misery and death down the throats of these unhappy 
 people. It is choking up the very stream of life that runs through 
 Scotland, so that the rulers of these northern towns and cities of 
 the kingdom must stand, as they send their sons to succor Belgium, 
 and see this enemy in our gates destroy the child-life of their land. 
 As cruel and callous a deed is this, committed in cold blood to make 
 a brewer's fortune as any deed committed by Hun. 
 
 You have read the ghastly story of the extermination of Ar- 
 menia. It is dramatic, and you notice it ; but you have not read, per- 
 haps, the drying up of this life-stream from Scotland? It is quiet 
 and slow, and it has alcohol and not guns behind it, and you do not 
 notice it; but is anything in this war more appalling than the vital 
 facts of Scotland? In the first full year of war the number of mar- 
 riages in Scotland was the largest ever known, but the number of 
 children born alive was the smallest ever known. The number of 
 deaths was almost the largest ever known, and the number of deaths 
 among babies was higher than for half a generation past. In these 
 record days of marriage the river of life in Scotland dries up as never 
 before, and those who are alive die faster, and those who are born 
 die in thousands when they would have lived a year or two ago. Is it 
 nothing to us that in the great days coming Scotland will be weaker 
 and not stronger than of old? 
 
 I am writing without passion ; I am simply telling the truth ; 
 
 22
 
 THE SOLDIER'S PERIL 
 
 but the simple truth is terrible now. A working man went out from 
 a workshop that I know to fight for his country, and he left behind 
 a wife and three children — a girl 13, a boy of three, and a little child 
 just born. The woman was probably lonely and unhappy — what 
 woman would not be, with a husband over there in front of German 
 -guns? Well, this great country offered her one means of escape 
 from loneliness and dullness — she could never be very far from a 
 public-house, with its. warm fire and its dazzling lights, and its com- 
 pany of miserable people trying to be happy. And so she started 
 drinking, and the other day she hanged herself, full of remorse and 
 shame for the disgrace she had brought on the man who was in the 
 trenches ; and there were waiting for him when he came home, three 
 motherless children and one of the most pathetic letters a man ever 
 has had to read. 
 
 Are we a clean and self-respecting people, and do we deserve to 
 win? If we are, and if we do, let us make it clear to the world. It 
 is more than time, for the heart of those who love our England, the 
 heart of those who know the things that are happening now, is nigh 
 unto breaking. 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 THE SOLDIER'S PERIL 
 
 It is a ghastly reflection that through all these years, while 
 Prussia has been building up for war, we ourselves have been de- 
 stroying the very power of victory- Where would Germany have 
 stood today had the man-pow^er we destroyed been at our side in 
 France? The war w^ould have been over. How many lives might 
 these lost men have saved? How much devastation of Europe? 
 What a flood of human misery and tears? But they lie in their 
 graves, and we cry from the depths of our souls for men. 
 
 Terrible enough that is, but after all, it may be said, it lies in 
 the past, and we know better now. Yes, we know better now, and 
 we go on in the same old way. 
 
 What is the most staggering fact of all that strikes us when 
 we really think of man-power in this country? It is surely this — 
 that wdiile the law of Britain makes it a crime to give alcohol to a 
 little child, while the law makes it a crime to take a boy of 14 inside 
 a public-house, it is within the power of a Government department 
 in this country to take our boys in their decisive years, these boys 
 the law has saved from alcohol, and to drive them, whether they 
 
 23
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 will or no, into all the perils and temptations of drink. We guard 
 them from it in their childhood, we protect them in their youth, and 
 when the danger of life begins for them we drive them into it. 
 
 So, since this war began, we have driven the young manhood 
 of England to live day by day in the atmosphere of its greatest foe; 
 we who say the Lord's Prayer in our churches have led into temp- 
 tation and delivered unto evil hundreds of thousands of clean British 
 lads who have never touched this thing since they lisped the Lord's 
 Prayer at their mother's knee- These boys who love a game, who 
 know that when they run a race, or play a match, or want to be 
 fit for any noble purpose, they must do as a Polar explorer does and 
 leave this drink alone — what do they think of this game that we call 
 them to, where they can drink and drink and drink again, drink them- 
 selves mad to murder their comrades if they will, as one lad did the 
 other day? "Is there nobody to control this drinking in our camps?" 
 the Judge asked as he sentenced this poor boy ; and the answer was 
 simply, "No." Not only is there no one to control it, but it pays 
 our regimental funds to have this stuff sold in canteens, for there is 
 a profit for the funds on all the alcohol sold. 
 
 There has been some reconstruction in these things, but still 
 the grip of this foul trade is on our camps, and still this vested in- 
 terest has the first word and the last in the management of our can- 
 teens. Lord Kitchener, being dead, yet speaketh, and every man re- 
 members his plea that our men should keep fit by leaving drink 
 alone; but every canteen mocks at him, and by the acts that speak 
 louder than words authority scofl's at him, and tells our young re- 
 cruits that they need not follow Lord Kitchener, they need not fol- 
 low the King; it will be enough if they go on drinking and give the 
 state the strength that alcohol leaves them. 
 
 So the young manhood of Britain is delivered unto drink, by 
 state compulsion. The stupidity of authority in this country is one 
 of the things that can never be believed. We cry out against the 
 men who were not ready with the guns that should have equipped 
 our army ; we cry out against the men who were not ready with the 
 shells, but hardly do we hear a whisper against the men who force 
 this drink into our camps, who care not that they ruin our troops 
 by doing it, who care not if they jeopardize the Empire. They 
 <-ake it to the firing line itself ; they sent it out to distant troops, 
 where it causes endless suffering, so that there is always drink avail- 
 able, whatever else is not ; when there was hardly a drop of water to 
 drink the few transports that reached our men in Mesopotamia had 
 plenty of room for whisky. 
 
 24
 
 THE SOLDIER'S PERIL 
 
 But worse than this is the act of cruelty that authority is capa- 
 ble of, and guilty of, out in the very trenches. There was a shame- 
 less paragraph the other day in the papers, which stated that hun- 
 dreds of thousands of gallons of rum had been sent out to the 
 trenches, the War Office having been satisfied of its medical value. 
 It IS an abominable act of cruelty, and the nation is entitled to 
 know who is the degenerate in the War Office who dares to con- 
 tradict the highest medical authorities in Great Britain. Who is the 
 great medical authority whose word is taken in Whitehall above 
 the word of Sir Victor Horsley, Sir Alfred Pearce Gould, Sir Lauder 
 Brunton and Sir Alfred Keogh? Who is this daring officer of state, 
 and what is the interest he has in defying all experience, all knowl' 
 edge, and contradicting all authorities by sending out this rum to 
 be the cause of untold suffering? Whose word is it that weighs 
 against the word of Lord Kitchener, the word of Lord French and 
 the word of the Director General of the Army Medical Service, and 
 what strange subtle power can this trade have that overrides them 
 all? The grave question of alcohol within the ranks of our army is 
 obviously closed to full discussion here, but we have the weighty 
 statements of those whose authority is accepted throughout the 
 world to guide us, and they are unchallengeably against the value 
 of alcohol in general and of the rum ration in particular. 
 
 But there are other aspects of the effect of drink on troops which 
 need no expert knowledge to discuss, and are vital to us all. In 
 time of peace we teach our boys that drink is bad for them. How- 
 ever men may like it, no serious man pretends that alcohol is good. 
 No man pretends that alcohol helps us at a time like this. As 
 science condemns it on physical grounds in the name of the fitness 
 of our army, so the King himself has condemned it on national 
 grounds in the name of the efficiency of the state- What special 
 type of madness is it, then, that administers this stuff to the army 
 on which our liberties depend? What sort of impression of the 
 authority of science, what sort of respect for the King, do we plant 
 in these millions of young men who see a private trade defying 
 both? And what use will it be for churches and schools and par- 
 liaments and doctors and fathers and mothers to tell these lads when 
 they come home that alcohol is no good to them? Surely it must 
 be good, they will argue, if the Government gave it us to fight the 
 Germans with ; and so an ounce of this degenerate practice will 
 weigh down any ton of precept. 
 
 And then there is that great host of boys, hundreds of thousands 
 strong, who came into the army never having touched this thing — 
 
 25
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 fine boys with the hope of Britain in them, growing- up clean and 
 strong to rule this country in the days of peace. They have never 
 been very far from the public-house, for this trade has put one close 
 by every street. For the sake of a few paltry pounds a year this 
 trade can put temptation in the path of every youth and every girl 
 who walk about this land ; but they were proof against it, these hun- 
 dreds of thousands of boys, and they were growing up as decent 
 men should grow, when the state took hold of them. And now this 
 state that had neglected them so long puts them in the very center 
 of temptation ; it wants them at their very best, but it makes it worth 
 somebody's while to poison them. Perhaps they escape temptation 
 here, perhaps they may be strong enough to quit themselves like 
 men, but this temptation follows them to the fighting line, it creeps 
 up to the trenches, and right in the midst of death this insidious 
 enemy makes its way- 
 
 So the work of building up the man-power of the future, of 
 giving it moral strength, and splendid vision, and the love of fine, 
 clean things, is undone in a night or two for thousands of young 
 men. Dr. Norman Maclean was riding in a tram, and an old man 
 sat there in great distress. He had lost his boy at the front. When 
 he joined the army he had never tasted alcohol, but he found drink 
 in his camp, he found it in the trenches, he found it all the way 
 between, and when he came home on leave to see his mother he 
 was drunk every night. He was drunk the night he went away 
 again, and in three days he was dead. "The last we saw of him,' 
 said the poor old man between his sobs, "was his going awa}^ drunk, 
 and his mother, who is old-fashioned in her faith, cannot get it out 
 of her mind that no drunkard can enter the Kingdom of God." 
 
 There are tales like this by the hundred, and they lie at the door 
 of whatever degenerate mind it is that overrules these things in 
 Whitehall ; but they lie at your door and mine, for we have let the 
 seed be sown, and this is the fruit of the tree. 
 
 The power of a trade that can hold its own against the interests 
 of a nation fighting for its life is unthinkable, but it grows from the 
 mastery of alcohol over those who take it. Men may take it, and 
 it may do them little harm, but it will slowly master them. It forms 
 a habit that they will not yield ; they like it ; they do not see the 
 harm it does them, and why should they give it up because another 
 man may reel and chatter when he drinks? So the strength of a 
 habit weaves itself into the fate of nations. Men do not like to give 
 it up, and so, if they are soldiers, it goes with them into the field; 
 if they happen to be statesmen, or even only politicians, it counts 
 
 26
 
 THE SOLDIER'S PERIL 
 
 -.vith them in politics. A well-known public man went out to France- 
 A distinguished member of the House of Lords sent him a case 
 of old brandy, and one day the great man asked for some. "Very 
 sorry, sir," said the orderly, "but there is none left." "What!" said 
 the officer, "where is all that stuff from Lord Blank?" "Very sorry, 
 sir, but a German shell fell into the case and there is nothing left." 
 The great man's fists shut tight and he showed his teeth. "By God ! 
 They shall pay for that," said he. They had broken Rheims Cathe- 
 dral, they had shattered Belgium, they had ruined Serbia and 
 Poland and sunk the Lusitania, but, by God ! they should pay for 
 destroying his brandy. It is the sort of mind that sits in Parlia- 
 ment and has its way in Cabinets. It does not like the disturbance 
 of its social habit, it does not know how drink reacts upon us all ; 
 it believes that Sir Conan Doyle is a crank when he says that the 
 drink that is one man's pleasure is another man's death. 
 
 And so this trade must follow the army all the way. It begins 
 at the camp ; it ends at the trenches. It is not true that it does men 
 good and makes them warm ; it does them harm and makes them 
 cold. But the truth is the last thing authority wants. Authority 
 wants to be left alone in its little Government office, doing the old 
 thing in the old way and letting the knowledge of the world go by ; 
 it wants to renew the old contracts with the old firms. "Things 
 have always been done like that, and we don't want these busybodies 
 here." It is not even true that rum is the only thing we can give our 
 men in the trenches. There are hot drinks that we can give them — 
 tea and coffee and cocoa and drinks made from meat — things that 
 spur a hero on, with the sugar that goes to the hero's aid and makes 
 him twice a hero when he leaps the parapet. 
 
 It is one of the marvelous things about the human body that 
 at a time like that, when a man is facing death, the sugar in his 
 blood comes to his aid and makes him twice the man he thought he 
 was. At the sight of danger, by the law of a higher power than man, 
 the sugar in a man's blood is increased by one-third, as if Mother 
 Nature knew that her son had need of strength ; and it is then, and 
 at that very hour, that the British Government gives its men a 
 drink that makes them cold, and that can only be made by the de- 
 struction of the sugar that would make them warm. It is unthink- 
 able, incredible, but it is true, and it is not true that there is no 
 alternative- It should be known to every man in the four corners 
 of the United Kingdom that the Y. M. C. A., the most efficient or- 
 ganization in the whole area of the war, is able and ready to relieve 
 the authorities of the labor of dealing out rum, and to supplv every 
 
 27
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 man in the firing line with hot tea or coffee or cocoa. There is not 
 & physiologist in this country whose heart would not be glad at the 
 thought of that; there is surely not a patriot who would not leap 
 with joy if it were done. 
 
 The pitiful truth is that the state provides the means of degen- 
 eration, and leaves it to the Y- M. C. A. to lift a man up. Every- 
 where throughout the war the great moral forces and the forces of 
 humanity are confronted with this hostile trade. It hinders the 
 Y. M. C. A., it hampers the Red Cross ; there is not a moral or a 
 social worker, not a doctor or a Red Cross nurse, who would not 
 gladly see it swept away. Where a town does its duty, says one of 
 our Brigadier Generals, the army is clean and sober. At Bedford, 
 with bright and happy places for the men to go to, he had no drunk- 
 enness with his men, but at Perth, where nobody cared, whisky was 
 literally forced down their throats^ and they were inundated with 
 women. 
 
 We may be thankful that there still are in Britain great forces 
 of humanity that dare to fight this trade and all its works- Two 
 things there are, if there were nothing else to say against this trade, 
 that should make every man and woman in these islands blush with 
 shame. It is bad enough to withhold from our men in the trenches 
 whatever help we can send them ; but it is worse to break their 
 strength as they go out and to shatter their hope when they come 
 back stricken. And drink does both. It robs them of the power 
 to endure in the task that lies before them ; it robs them of the 
 chances of recovery when they come back wounded men. 
 
 There are two organizations in Britain that no man living will 
 ever forget. One of them keeps met fit; it guards them from the 
 great temptations this trade puts in their way. It is the Y. M. C. A. 
 The other cares for men when they are sick and wounded ; it touches 
 with humanity this hideous carnage of men. It is the Red Cross. 
 And drink is fighting both. 
 
 Every soldier loves the Y. M. C. A., with its red triangle. It 
 has done whatever an organization can to redeem the state from the 
 shame of its canteens and public-houses. It gives the men a bright 
 and comfortable place when they can read and write, and have mu- 
 sic and coffee and good friends and good company- Let us remem- 
 ber, as long as we live, that the Y. M. C. A. has kept thousands of 
 our soldiers clean and strong when drink would have ruined them. 
 It has saved for the army thousands of men whom public-houses 
 would have made unfit. It saves our munition workers, too, wher- 
 
 28
 
 THE SOLDIER'S PERIL 
 
 ever it can, from all the temptations of our streets, and from the 
 drink they can always find close by in some foul tap-room. 
 
 We have only to be a decent nation to realize the dishonorable 
 folly of thrusting our men into the midst of such temptation while 
 we train them for the great war of Europe. We should not train 
 them so for any race with a smaller prize ; we should not train them 
 so for any voyage of discovery; we should not give them such con- 
 ditions for any great industrial piece of work for which we were 
 urgently waiting. We have only to be honorable men to agree with 
 that solemn appeal by the Times in supporting Lord Kitchener's 
 protest against drink: , 
 
 "Supposing these men were preparing themselves to uphold the honor of 
 their country in the Olympian Games," said the Times. "Their friends would 
 help them and would be filled with horror if they saw one going wrong. To 
 encourage him to drink would be held an act of treachery deliberately in- 
 tended to injure him and the national cause. What are the Olympian Games, 
 or any other contests whatever, compared with this? They are play, make- 
 believe. This is the real thing, the true test of manhood. Is our manhood, 
 then, to be a shame or an honor to us?" 
 
 No man who loves his country is there who would not respond 
 to that appeal, and what we do in daily practice the Y. M. C- A. 
 does for us as a nation. The state allows this trade to tempt our 
 men; the Y. M. C. A. does what it can to save them from tempta- 
 tion. It is giving to the army what all wise men have craved for so 
 long for our people— a counter attraction to the public-house- We 
 set up a big munition works in a provincial town, and of course the 
 Y. M. C. A. must go with one of its fine huts. It is a shameful 
 thing to say, but before it arrived the only recreation this country 
 offered these munition men was in three filthy public-houses. The 
 Y. M. C. A. altered all that with their hut, but when the Y- M. C. A. 
 asked for sugar for the men's hot tea and coflfee; they ordered a ton 
 and got about 50 pounds. The Y. M. C. A., which is saving our 
 men and giving them a home from home, could not gets its sugar 
 because the public-houses were using it up to ruin our men and 
 weaken them. The drink trade hates these huts with the red tri- 
 angle. "What on earth do we want these things for? What is 
 wrong with the public-house?" 
 
 And it goes without saying that drink is the enemy of the Red 
 Cross and all its work. It is one of our army Colonels, a well-known 
 surgeon who has had 50,000 wounded men pass through his hos- 
 pital, who declares that alcohol has added enormously to their suf- 
 fering; and it is another Colonel who has called attention to the 
 tremendous relief from strain that would come to the medical and 
 
 29
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 nursing profession if the drink trade could be stopped. He gives 
 the case of a hospital in a Midland town which has to deal with 
 about 400 people a year who come to it through drink; and if we mul- 
 tiply a case like this for the whole United Kingdom we can realize 
 the heavy burden that must fall on doctors and nurses and hospital 
 staffs. Not less but more this burden is in these days — how much 
 more we can imagine from a table of accidents prepared on the cor- 
 poration tramways in Glasgow. It is a time-table of four hours 
 on a Saturday night in war time, and it gives only accidents in which 
 drink was officially returned as the cause. Between 6:15 and 10:20 
 p. m. there were sixteen of these accidents — that is to say, there was 
 a drink accident on the Glasgow tramways every quarter of an hour. 
 If we take the case of every town and every hospital and every doc- 
 tor's private practice, the drink strain on doctors and nurses and 
 their staffs is past all conception, and the strain reacts heavily on the 
 medical work of the army. 
 
 We cannot know what that strain is; nor can we know how 
 many thousand wounded men are still in hospitals today who would 
 long ago have been back fighting but for drink. Thousands will 
 never recover at all who would have been well and fit now but for 
 this trade that tempted them and struck them down. Thousands 
 and tens of thousands are down with a foul disease who would have 
 been fit now under Prohibition. Many are madmen now who would 
 have been a credit to their country, fighting for it, had the Govern- 
 ment followed the King. Back from the trenches with severe ner- 
 vous strain, men cannot stand the shock of alcohol. This poison 
 that acts so slowly in times of normal health acts quickly now. A 
 convalescent asked for leave. He was well enough to go, but in 
 four hours he came back drunk with whisky, and died after a ter- 
 rible night. From one hospital alone a large percentage of wounded 
 men have been sent back to Canada driven mad by drink, and the 
 state has considered its duty done by sending a man to prison- 
 
 There are limits to the strain that a human mind can bear, and 
 we must leave these things of bitterness and shame. We need the 
 heart of a Prussian to dwell overlong on the harvest Britain reaps 
 from drink. 
 
 30
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 THE MENACE TO THE EMPIRE 
 
 Eve'n in these dark days there are consolations for the friends 
 of freedom. There is the thought that never again can these things 
 be if we are worthy of our trust. If we put in one scale all the 
 ghastly things of these days and in the other scale no more than the 
 unbreakable unity of the British Empire, the gain will weigh down 
 the loss. It is said that the Huns have bound the British Empire in 
 new bonds, and it is true; but one thing more is true: it is true that 
 this drink trade is sapping the bonds that bind our Dominions to 
 the Motherland. We can never be defeated, Carlyle says, save by 
 ourselves, and we sit in these dark days and watch a private trade 
 sowing all about us the seeds of our defeat. 
 
 Can anything be more hopeless than this — that with the cure 
 for our national cancer in our hands we let the cancer grow and 
 spread and fix its grip more firmly on these islands? In these days, 
 when the Empire offers up its noblest life for us. we fling them back 
 this cancer. They come to us, they give themselves, they give their 
 money and their men to crush this foul thing that we call the Ger- 
 man Empire, and they find themselves confronted and imperiled in 
 their Motherland by an enemy fouler still, menacing and compassing 
 not only the ruin of their noblest manhood but the ruin of little chil- 
 dren yet unborn. Let us look at the relations of the Empire to this 
 trade. Our Dominions know it well ; they have it in their grip, and 
 they go the way of America, which is driving out alcohol as fast 
 as election time will let them. 
 
 The Empire knows- From Wellington to Saskatchewan the 
 eyes of our people are on the Motherland, half fearing, half pitying 
 her weakness in the presence of her home-bred foes. When the 
 Empire sends us men they come from Prohibition camps ; when 
 the Empire sends us shells they come from Prohibition shops. 
 
 You have seen these splendid men from our Dominions march- 
 ing through the streets ; heroes they look like long before they reach 
 the war. They breathe the air of the boundless spaces of the Em- 
 pire, of the prairies of Canada and the wheat-lands of Australasia- 
 They show us the sort of men the British Empire is bringing up to 
 rule the world when we are gone. Well, the other night I shook 
 hands with one of their captains, and he was burning with two great 
 passions. He was ready to die for England, and he was ready to 
 
 31
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 live to smash this curse of drink. "Send us as many shells as you 
 like," said he, "but for God's sake keep your liquors back. Our men 
 come from a decent country ; they come to you in thousands free 
 from alcohol, many from Prohibition areas in New Zealand; and 
 they come here and find drink in your camps ; they come up to Lon- 
 don on leave and have this stufif poured down their throats ; they go 
 out to France, and your horrible British beer follows them to the 
 firing line; all the way up it goes. They could stand the light 
 French wines, but all these houses on the way with British Beer 
 Sold Here are death-traps to our lads." 
 
 And almost on the day that I met this Anzac Captain a Cana- 
 dian Captain was writing a letter in France — I have it by me as I 
 write. It is burning with indignation that, while Canada is on fire 
 from end to end for Prohibition, while she pours out her manhood 
 to fight for England and drives out drink to prepare a clean country 
 for those who return. England takes these men of hers, these fine 
 young men from Prohibition Canada, and will not let them keep 
 from drink, but will force it on them whether they will or no. It is 
 time that that were said. 
 
 The Canadian Government in the early days of the war issued 
 an order that there should be no alcohol in the Canadian camps. 
 They were willing to go Lord Kitchener's way, and leave this thing 
 alone. They sent their men from clean Canadian camps — camps to 
 which there was no admittance for alcohol or any other traitor to 
 the strensfth of Britain. Thev sent their men in Prohibition ships — 
 not a drop of alcohol did these men touch in that great fieet that 
 brought them to these shores. And then they touched our earth, 
 the soil of England, the soil that Linnaeus kissed for all that Eng- 
 land meant to him, the soil a Belgian mother kissed for all that 
 England meant to her. But what has this soil of England, in which 
 freedom grew, meant for our Empire's sons? For thousands of 
 them it has meant everlasting ruin in this world, disease and disaster 
 for them and broken hearts in their distant homes. What hap- 
 pened to these Canadian men from Prohibition camps was that they 
 were placed in camps where this drink trade followed them against 
 their will, in which we drove it after them, in which we have let it 
 work its way and mar their manhood and sap their character and 
 break their strength. It was the thing they feared in Canada, the 
 thing that sent a shudder through many a wife and mother as the 
 man who was all in all to her left her to fight for Britain. One 
 thing only they asked their Government ; they asked that the man- 
 hood of Canada, that they gave into Britain's keeping, should be 
 
 32
 
 THE MENACE OF THE EMPIRE 
 
 protected from this terrible trade. They made a formal request 
 to the responsible member of the Government that this should be, 
 and they received an assurance that it should be so. The order of 
 the Canadian Government was that no alcohol should be sold or 
 drunk in Canadian camps, but the desire of the Canadian Govern- 
 ment was overruled in England. The only condition that Canada 
 made in sending her manhood to fight for us was put aside. No words 
 can measure the terrible results of that decision. "Do not be sur- 
 prised," said a great Canadian, "if you lose Canada over this." 
 
 It is not vain talk ; it is the natural consequence of preferring 
 the interests of a private trade to the interests of the British Em- 
 pire. In the tug of war between drink and munitions in the early 
 days drink was winning all the time; in the tug of war between the 
 Empire and the drink trade at its heart drink wins again. No pe- 
 tition for a quarter of a century has been so widely and readily 
 signed in Canada as the great petition of protest from wives and 
 mothers to the Prime Minister of the Dominion. For weeks thou- 
 sands of mothers and wives were signing it every day, and in one 
 month in Ontario alone over 60,000 married women signed their 
 names. "We do not believe," said this petition, "that our King will 
 refuse the aid of Canada's sons, nor appreciate our patriotic efforts 
 l€ss, if you keep faith with us and make it known to his Ministers 
 and commanders that our boys are sent on the one condition that 
 intoxicating liquors shall be prohibited in their ranks." I "have a 
 letter on my desk from a Canadian officer, written at the front a 
 month or two ago. Here is this voice from the battlefields of 
 France : 
 
 Canadian mothers have said that if England will not respect our ideals 
 in our own Canadian Camps, we will not send our sons! A huge mothers' 
 and wives' and sisters' petition was sent to the Canadian Government on this 
 question over a year ago and hundreds of Canadian women who love England 
 have refrained from urging their men to enlist. I am convinced that could 
 our Canadian women have seen the difference made by one month on a wet 
 transport and a wet camp in England, thousands of men would have been 
 urged by them not to enlist. Obviously the daughter who is mistress in her 
 own house cannot dictate to the mother, but she must- guard her own sons, even 
 at the expense of sacrificing the appearance of loyalty. The ties that bind 
 her to the Motherland can only be strengthened by any Hunnish power, but 
 it is a terrific wrench on our conscience to send men out to stand between 
 the two fires of the Hun and King Alcohol. 
 
 How many people in this country realize what Canada has 
 done to save the British Empire? She has followed the King. She 
 has set up a war-producing area over 4,000 miles of territory, with 
 enormous workshops — every one a Prohibition shop. Prohibition 
 
 33
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 has swept the Dominion as by fire; except in Quebec no alcohol 
 will be sold in Canada until the war is won. She takes her stand 
 with the King and the Czar; she is the courageous ally of Russia 
 and of France. She will have nothing to do with this trade that 
 held back guns and shells while her men were dying for them out 
 in France. She will sweep it out of Canada and have a clean 
 country for those who go back. Crime is rapidly disappearing, and 
 there is a general quickening up of life and industry throughout 
 the provinces. It is literally true that in one part of Canada the 
 citizens have held a social gathering in an empty gaol to celebrate 
 Prohibition, and towards the end of 1916 the gaol at Toronto was 
 closed- 
 
 So Canada equips her men to fight for Britain ; so she prepares 
 her wide Dominions for those who go back. Leave Canada for a 
 moment and turn to Australia. What does Australia' think of our 
 capitulation to this trade, Australia that will not have this trade 
 in its canteens and sends its Anzac men, every one of them, from 
 Prohibition camps to die for British liberty? What does Australia 
 think of a Motherland that lets its Southern children buy up all their 
 wheat on their wide continent, that receives the offer of this wheat 
 with profound expressions of gratitude, and then finds, when it looks 
 for ships, that we are too short of ships to fetch the wheat, though 
 ships are busy all the time bringing in stuff for beer and whisky 
 and gin? We do not know, but we may make a shrewd guess what 
 Australia thinks from the action of her Prime Minister, who, find- 
 ing us short of ships with a great drink fleet working all the time, 
 came over here and bought a fleet, and did what he could to put 
 a stop to such an imperial scandal as that. A fine spectacle for the 
 British Empire! 
 
 And now turn to Africa. There are within the Empire immense 
 reserve forces of native labor, willing and capable of rendering ser- 
 vice to the Allies in non-combatant work. Very well, says Sir God- 
 frey Lagden, who knows the native well, use him by all means, but 
 whatever you do remember this — that one reason why we fear to 
 use the native peoples is that it is a public danger to expose them 
 to drink. Go back a few years, and listen to another of our Af- 
 rican statesmen. Sir George Goldie, founder of Nigeria, who said 
 that drink was bringing about a state of things which, if it were no* 
 controlled, must lead to the entire abandonment of that country; 
 and now come to the chief heroic figure that war has ever producec^ 
 in Africa, General Botha. We find his opinion in the ofiicial record.<« 
 of the South African Parliament, for he told that Parliament not 
 
 34
 
 THE MENACE OF THE EMPIRE- 
 
 long ago that unless the Government took severe measures to deal 
 with drink it would become impossible for a white man to live in 
 South Africa. 
 
 So this hideous trade weaves itself into the very fabric of th** 
 British Empire; but even yet we have not seen the full and bitte*" 
 truth of it. These Empire men who come to fight and die for us, 
 who give us their strong limbs, clear minds, and loyal hearts and 
 lay them on our altar — what do we give them back again? 
 
 We know something about venereal disease — we are allowed 
 to talk about this devilish thing at least ; we know that drink is the 
 cause of most of it, that drink leads men into temptation, reduces 
 their power of resistance, and decreases their chance of recovery. 
 But perhaps we do not know the ghastly truth about this foul dis- 
 ease: that it carries a canker to the grave and even beyond the 
 grave, for it winds its way like a snake through the lives of little 
 children from one generation to another. In peace time in our 
 small British army the lost days from this cause alone were over 
 200,000 in a single year, and if things were no worse than that in 
 chese days the lost days in our present army would be over six mil- 
 lions in a year. That is bad enough truly, but what are lost days 
 compared with lost men? And what shall we say of our lost men, 
 the men who came into our camps fit and strong and willing to offer 
 up their lives for freedom, but are fit no longer and can strike no 
 blow for freedom because this enemy at home has struck them down 
 and made them things of shame? We are not allow^ed to publish 
 figures that throw light on ghastly things like this; the truth would 
 be so terrible that even this insolent drink trade could hardly sur- 
 vive it, for drink, as Dr. Saleeby says, is the great confederate of 
 venereal disease, and the removal of drink, as the Royal Commis- 
 sion on this subject said, would be an enormous factor in fighting 
 this foul thing. 
 
 We may not tell the truth, but we may say that the truth would 
 set all Canada on fire. Is this how we pay the Empire back for 
 all its love and devotion and death? They lend their manhood to 
 us, clean without and clean within, and some of it we can never 
 send home again; but those men we do send back, shall they go 
 back to their mothers and sisters, back to our clean Dominions, 
 with the seeds of drink and venereal disease in them? Is this to be 
 the gift we send to Canada and Australasia, to these wide healthy 
 spaces of the earth that are free from this foul thing? Are these 
 the seeds we are sowing now for the great British harvest of the 
 days to come? Was it for this the Anzacs came across the sea ta 
 
 35
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 perish on Gallipoli? Is it for this that Canada's young men leap 
 over the top in the Valley of the Somme? 
 
 Here is the story the wives and mothers of Canada have been 
 reading of the boys and men they sent out to us on their Govern- 
 ment's word that they should be free from the temptation of drink. 
 Some of these men wounded in the trenches were in an English hos- 
 pital; their broken bodies were at the mercy of the state. Their 
 mothers and wives were assured that they would be protected from 
 the only enemy they feared, but these men went out of hospital on 
 leave and they went back drunk, and a Canadian doctor from the 
 hospital stated on his oath that a large percentage of these wounded 
 troops had to be sent back to Canada rendered permanently insane 
 by alcohol. 
 
 What sort of a nation is it that, ac a time like this, flaunts this 
 stuflf of insanity in the face of its soldiers everywhere, that brings 
 these fine young men from the Empire to live or die for you and 
 me, that mocks the thought that they should leave this stuff alone, 
 and puts it in their way to ruin them and drive them- mad? What 
 sort of laws are they that license men to sell this stuff, and send 
 them to prison for selling it to turn our heroes into lunatics? What 
 sort of men are they who put this drink in our canteens and give 
 the regimental funds a profit on the sale of it? I love my country; 
 1 think of the British Empire as the greatest instrument raised up 
 by God to spread His Kingdom through this world; but, for the 
 life of me, I can see not a pin to choose between the men who send 
 our Empire's manhood home with the seeds of ruin and disease in 
 them, and the men who throw children to the sharks and sink a 
 Lusitania. 
 
 Draw up your imperial balance sheet, and here are some items 
 for vou : 
 
 Drink sending back to Canada and Australasia the seeds of this 
 cancer we will not cure at home; 
 
 Drink sending to our Dominions the seed of foul disease ; 
 
 Drink keeping back a huge reserve of man-power; 
 
 Drink threatening the very existence of Nigeria; 
 
 Drink imperiling the mighty- future of South Africa ; 
 
 Drink alienating and defying, in this great imperial hour, the 
 mothers and sisters and wives without whose aid the Empire cannot 
 stand. 
 
 We are the Empire builders of the world ; let us see that we 
 build like men and not like imbeciles- 
 
 .16
 
 CHAPTER V 
 LET US CALL THE WITNESSES 
 
 It is time the whole nation knew that an enemy in their midst 
 has prolonged the war. If the newspapers were to tell the truth 
 to the nation in the morning they still might save the state from 
 a dishonored page in history. We hunt out our spies; we find a 
 little tailor here or a little waiter there, and we lock him up ; we 
 strip the gorgeous colors off our traitor princes ; we dissolve a 
 German partnership and wind up a German bank; but this enemy 
 trade goes on its prospering way, and it does more damage to 
 Britain and the war than if every little German tailor and every 
 little German waiter and every German bank were left free to do 
 their work. If every German in this country walked about our 
 streets, if the gates of our internment camps were flung wide open, 
 that would be less harmful to us and less helpful to the Kaiser than 
 the liberty we give this drink trade, with its sentinels in every town 
 and hamlet, its headquarters' staff entrenched behind gold ramparts, 
 and its chief men in Parliament. ^ 
 
 These are not times when we need be over-nice with words. 
 We may call the German Emperor an assassin when we meet him ; 
 we may call this drink a traitor every time we meet it up and down 
 the land. If the truth about the trade were known as widely as 
 the truth about the Lusitania there would go up in this country 
 such a cry of burning shame, "SUch a prayer to God for help, that 
 no Government could stand one hour in Downing street until all 
 these pro-German forts had been struck down. Let the truth here 
 be told. We shall see that in this hour when Europe rocks and 
 reels, when Europe turns to Britain once again for its salvation, 
 Britain lies in the grip of an enemy that binds her hands and chokes 
 her breath. We toil and pray for the power that will help us to 
 destroy cancer; but cancer is not personal only, it is national too. 
 What should we say of any man who had the cure for cancer in his 
 keeping, and held it back because it was profitable to him that mil- 
 lions of men and women should suffer this great agony? Well, we 
 have in our keeping the cure for this cancer at the heart of Britain, 
 and we keep it back. It pays a private trade to give us a million 
 pounds a week to keep it back, and we — we who say what we say 
 about the Germans — are willing that it should be so. 
 
 Let us call up the witnesses and see the evidence against this 
 
 n
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 traitor trade. We will call no witness whose word would not be 
 taken in a court of law ; we will confine ourselves to facts that are 
 unassailable. 
 
 We keep the deepest scorn of our British race for those who 
 see others in danger and refuse to help. We are unworthy of our 
 living and our dead in France unless we are giving every ounce 
 of our strength to help our country now. Yet what have we seen 
 in these thirty months? We have seen the greatest private trade 
 in Britain working against us all the time. There is not a shadow 
 of doubt about it; the bitter truth of it rings through the world. 
 There is hardly a country in which the papers have not wondered 
 at it ; there is no part of our British Dominions where the fact does 
 not cause shame and pain- For thirty months this trade has been 
 as a brake on the nation. If there were a man in this country of 
 whom it could be said that he had added months to the war his 
 doom would be at hand in the hour that that was known, and yet, 
 though this is true of no single man, it is true of the drink trade 
 ally of the German Emperor. There are the highest authorities in 
 all the British Empire for saying that. 
 
 We know the ghastly ways in which our enemy has worked 
 its will abroad ; we know too well of the ruthless destruction of 
 Belgium, the enslavement of helpless and innocent people, the 
 butchery of men and women and children, the stealing of the food 
 of civil populations, the throwing of little children to the sharks, 
 the sinking of peaceful ships at sight- Those have been the ways 
 of the enemy power abroad ; what have been the ways of the enemy 
 power at home? It has robbed our people of their food; it has 
 robbed our army of guns and shells ; it has robbed our fleet of ship- 
 ping power and slowed down ships to make a target for a German 
 submarine. It has kept our men from labor on which liberty de- 
 pends ; it has tempted the wives of our soldiers and driven them to 
 ruin and death ; it has stolen the food of little children and of 
 wounded soldiers; it has rewarded wounded men by planting in 
 ihem the seeds of raving madness ; it has used up sugar while sol- 
 diers have begged for it in vain. It has slowed down transports 
 while the bitter needs of war have cried insistently for help. It kept 
 back machine guns from men dying for them in the trenches ; it kept 
 back shells for want of which men died while Germany bound her- 
 self round with a ring of steel. Those are the ways in which our 
 enemy has worked at home. 
 
 It may be that you will not believe; it has been the tragedy 
 since Calvary that men will not believe. We would not believe 
 
 38
 
 THE DESTRUCTION OF FOOD 
 
 Lord Roberts when he said the war was coming; we would not be- 
 heve him when he pleaded that we should be ready ; we would not 
 believe him when, in almost his last words to his country, he warned 
 us that drink was prejudicing our chance of victory. 
 
 The nation never will believe. But for those who would know 
 the truth, who will give a few minutes of their lives to know the 
 terrible truth about Britain now, the facts are clear and readily avail- 
 ?ible, and we may look at them. They cover the six great fields of 
 activity upon which our liberties aepend in these days — Food, Labor, 
 Munitions, Transport, Money, and our Defensive Forces. There is 
 not one of these fields of national service in which drink has not 
 enormously reduced our efficiency, and in which the Prohibition of 
 the drink traffic from this day next month would not enormously 
 increase our efficiency. 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE DESTRUCTION OF FOOD 
 
 The plain fact about drink and food is that since the war began 
 we could have had, at the very least, three and one-half million more 
 tons of food in this country if there had been no drink trade. Drink 
 has stolen one pound of food from every home in this country for 
 every day of the war. That is what we have paid in food to keep 
 the drink trade going. 
 
 This nation is not so insane that it is much impressed by the 
 money the drink trade is spending to advertise nonsense about 
 grains and percentages. In the presence of this gigantic evil, with 
 this wholesale destruction of food going' on, while shortage and 
 famine loom threateningly ahead, we need not bother overmuch 
 with brewers and distillers who sit down and calculate their nice 
 percentages- It was in darker days than these — in 191 5 — when the 
 brewers sent round their appeals to those who could not go to the 
 front. The men in one brewery were wanting to go, but the direc- 
 tors could not spare them, for the great trade advertisements were 
 shoviting in big type that "If you cannot go to the front, you can 
 give up cocoa and drink ale," and somebody must stop at home to 
 make the ale. "If we must reduce our expenditure on food." said 
 another of these appeals, "that is one more reason for drinking 
 beer." And, of course, at one time we are told that beer is food, 
 and then that there is so little food in beer that it is not worth the 
 saving. The trade in drink is not really interested in food, for 
 
 39
 
 defeat:^ 
 
 they are deadly enemies. The drink trade lives on the destruction 
 of food. It is the simple fact that alcoholic liquors cannot be made 
 without destroying food, and that they survive by absorbing water 
 and so creating thirst : that is to say, this trade exists and flourishes 
 by consuming food and water, the two vital needs of life. 
 
 The actual loss of foodstuffs through the drink trade since the 
 war began would have been enough to feed London all the time. 
 The destruction of food at any time is an evil thing; the destruction 
 of food on an island which grows only one loaf in every six it eats 
 is beyond all pardon in time of peace ; but the wholesale destruction 
 of food on such an island in war time is a crime of the greatest 
 magnitude. We own one-quarter of the earth, and we grow enough 
 bread in the heart of the Empire to last our people only two months ; 
 we give up as much land in this country to beer and whisky as we 
 give to wheat; we give less and less to wheat and more and more 
 to drink. The wheat acres have gone down, but the drink acres 
 have been growing all the time, so that today this trade robs us 
 of two months' security against famine every year. For every acre 
 we give to growing wheat for food, drink takes an acre for destroy- 
 ing food: the land wasted on drink in this countrv would make 
 a field a mile wide from England to America. So drink destroys 
 our food supplies and hinders the proper cultivation of the land, 
 but it does infinitely more than that : it prevents the production of 
 food at home and wastes the food that comes from abroad. It does 
 all that in normal times ; but in times like these drink stops the 
 bringing in of food ; with famine threatening, it wastes the food it 
 gets, it keeps the bread from people's mouths, and it uses up or 
 holds back ships that would bring in supplies. In the crisis of our 
 food supplies this trade was found destroying wheat itself, so that 
 an order of the Board of Trade was necessary to protect our very 
 staff of life against these men who deal in death. 
 
 We need not be surprised that the Board of Trade should be 
 called upon to stop a crime like that ; the surprise should be that 
 the War Office has not long since stopped a crime far worse. Men 
 lie recovering from their wounds in hospitals, or stand on guard in 
 trenches, or go through their training camps, and ask in vain for 
 the sugar that they need. We give them all too little sugar all the 
 time, but this trade can always get it ; it uses up more sugar than 
 the army. A friend of mine has come home paralyzed from Egypt. 
 He was ready to give his life for England, but so far he has only 
 given his health and strength. He is back in a London hospital, 
 not far away from the docks where sugar arrives in thousands of 
 
 40
 
 THE DESTRUCTION OF FOOD 
 
 tons; but he asks in vain for sugar in his tea, for this vital need of 
 life is not for him; it is for his enem'y trade, which, just across the 
 road from this great hospital, is dragging women down, starving 
 children and killing babies fast. 
 
 It has been estimated that the loss through lack of sugar on 
 home-made jams alone was £4,000,000 in 1916; yet there was never 
 a day when there was not sugar enough for all the beer the people 
 wanted. A Nottinghamshire farmer wrote last year that he sent 
 55 cwt. of plums to market, and the price hardly paid for the pick- 
 ing and the carriage because sugar was so dear and scarce ; yet one 
 day in that week 15 tons of sugar went to a brewery close by- The 
 harvests have failed, the demand for food increases, but we waste 
 food all the time, wdiile the President of the Board of Trade cries 
 out that the solution of the food problem is as necessary for winning 
 the war as anything else. All the sugar brought to this country 
 must come by long journeys, occupying the precious time of ship^ ; 
 it comes to find this country gasping for it, but it finds the brewers 
 gaping for it, and the brewers win. They always win. It pays 
 them to destroy our food. There is no way like it for making money 
 easily. 
 
 We need not be deceived by such nonsense as is talked about the 
 value of beer as food. It is rubbish, and it is answered forever by 
 the Official Syllabus of the Board of Education. To obtain any real 
 nourishment from beer we should have to drink so much that the 
 good would be more than weighed down in the scale by the harm 
 of the alcohol, and apart from that the cost would be too great. It 
 is not true, either, that beer facilitates digestion; according to the 
 Board of Education, beer taken in suflficient quantities to be nutri- 
 tious interferes with the digestive functions and checks the absorp- 
 tion of food into the blood. 
 
 The greatest investigation ever made into the health of the 
 British people was made by the Committee on Physical Deterior- 
 ation in 1904, and the Committee has made it impossible for those 
 who love truth to claim any virtues for alcohol as food. It stated 
 its solemn conviction that the state should teach that the highest 
 degree of muscular vigor and attainment would be reached by total 
 abstinence from alcohol; that the alcohol habit, even when it does 
 not reach drunkenness, is always poisonous; that alcohol as a food 
 or tonic is useful to nobody' but harmful to all. and that it compli- 
 cates and renders more serious every acute illness. 
 
 The talk about beer as food means simply this, that we must 
 destrov tons of food to get pounds, in order that brewers mav grow 
 
 41
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 rich on their way to the House of Lords. The sum of this question 
 has been put by the War Savings Committee in its ofifiicial statement 
 that immense quantities of food materials are being lost and wasted, 
 and that if it were not so food prices would be lower. There has 
 never been a day since the price of food went up when the Gov- 
 ernment could not have put down prices by throwing on the mar- 
 ket these immense quantities of food that drink destroys. We pay 
 more for everything because produce, shipping and labor are scarce, 
 and -for all this drink is largely responsible. Bread is dearer partly 
 because drink has used up corn enough during the war to feed the 
 nation for nearly a year, and sugar enough to feed the nation for 
 ICO days. Shipping is scarce partly because drink has used up hun- 
 dreds of millions of cubic feet of shipping space, equal to a fleet of 
 many large ships working all the time. Labor is scarce partly be- 
 cause the drink habit seriously reduces the efificiency of g^ood work- 
 men, and keeps vast numbers from working at all. 
 
 We hear much of the value of this trade to cattle, but a trade 
 is in desperate straits when it defends itself against a charge of 
 starving men and women and children by saying that it feeds the 
 pigs. There is no real relation between this trade and cattle foods ; 
 we can do without it all the time, as the greatest dairying countries 
 in the world do, as Canada does, as Russia does. 
 
 The amazing statement has been made by Mr. R. E. Prothero, 
 of the Board of Agriculture, that but for brewers' grains we could 
 not send milk to our big towns as we do. It is obvious and utter 
 rubbish ; with the profound respect due to our Board of Agriculture, 
 it is hard to write without contempt of ignorance like this. We may 
 despair of our business Government, indeed, if we are to listen to 
 much of this treason to knowledge. It is as if we should take the 
 food from a table and claim the gratitude of the hungry children 
 for leaving them the swill-tub. The drink trade does not make cat- 
 tle food; it destroys cattle food. The trade does not make milk; 
 it destroys it. The brewer takes good barley, destroys the best of 
 it, and leaves the worst for cattle and pigs. He takes loo pounds 
 of barley and leaves 30 pounds of cattle food, chiefly husk and woody 
 fiber; the rest goes into drink, and what has happened is not that 
 we have gained 30 pounds of poor cattle food, but that we have lost 
 70 pounds of good cattle food and spoiled 30 pounds more. Out of 
 100 pounds of good food we have 30 pounds of bad. The case could 
 not be better put than in Mr. Charles Smith's letter to the Times. 
 Of 65,000,000 bushels of grain destroyed by the drink trade in the 
 year ending September 30, 1916, 
 
 42
 
 THE DESTRUCTION OF FOOD 
 
 24,700,000 bushels are changed into alcohol, carbon-dioxide (a 
 poisonous drug and a poisonous gas), )-east and sediment — mashtub 
 and barrel bottoms; 
 
 9,970,000 bushels are washed away, turned into gas, or evapo- 
 rated as water ; 
 
 19,500,000 bushels are barley husks and malt culms — two de- 
 teriorated residues useful as cattle food, but for that purpose inferior 
 to equal measures of barley; 
 
 11,050,000 bushels remain in the intoxicating liquor in a decom- 
 posed and putrefying condition, pickled in alcohol. 
 
 The liquor traders have not made any cattle food- They have 
 taken 65,000,000 bushels of that commodity and reduced it to 19,- 
 500,000 bushels, while impairing the quality as a feeding article. In 
 every direction they have impaired where they have not destroyed. 
 That is well said. The scientific truth of barley and brewers' 
 grains is that while the brewers' grains possess 50 albuminoids, 0.4 
 fats, and 9.4 carbo-hydrates, barley meal possesses 14.0 albuminoids, 
 2.0 fats, and 63.0 carbo-hydrates — a total of 14.8 of precious nourish- 
 ment against 79-0. 
 
 Our Minister of Agriculture knows agriculture and the Psalms. 
 If he will look at No. 79 Leaflet of the Board of Agriculture he will 
 find that the brewers' wet grains contain one-fifth of the value of 
 the barley; if he will look at his great book on the Psalms he will 
 find that the cattle on a thousand hills are the Lord's, and he will 
 wish to feed them on the food the Lord's earth yields for them, and 
 not on the poor stuff the drink trade yields. The good farmer does 
 not use the brewers' grains for cattle; the greatest dairy farmers in 
 the world will not use them ; they are not allowed to be used for the 
 cows that yield the milk and butter for Copenhagen ; and the author- 
 ities on infant feeding tell us why. The brewers' grains make milk 
 dangerous for infants. But, in any case, if this trade is necessary for 
 milk, what happens in that half of the world now living under Pro- 
 hibition? 
 
 We are asked to believe, also, that without this trade we should 
 starve for want of bread — "for where would the yeast come from?" 
 It is not long since the brewer's yeast was thrown on the land as 
 manure, where his finished product still might go with great ad- 
 vantage to the state ; but, in any case, his yeast is poor and second- 
 best. We can get all the yeast a nation wants without a drop of 
 beer, and thousands of bakers make their own, which keeps better 
 and is purer than the brewer's. 
 
 But even if we take this trade in its relation to our cattle, it 
 
 43
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 stands condemned on the face, of it. We need the word of a man 
 who knows these things, and there lies before me a letter from a 
 miller who does most of the selling for a firm with a huge annual 
 trade- 
 
 "I have been painfully struck," he says, "by the fearful calamity 
 to the, nation that arises through practically all the barley going for 
 malt instead of feed. Before the war we used to make £6 per ton 
 with our fine sharps, when we did well. This is pre-eminently the 
 food for little pigs and poultry, as barley-meal is pre-eminently the 
 food for pigs over 12 stones. Our price in July was about £10. 
 Since then it has gone up week by week, and in November, 1916, it 
 was about £16- Even now the demand far exceeds the supply. To 
 add to the troubles of the pig-feeder, the bulk of the fourths has 
 now .to go into the flour, and food for stock is practically unobtain- 
 able in the market. Poultry also are being sold, with the result of 
 a continuous scarcity of eggs. The irony of the whole matter is 
 that at our very doorstep there is abundant food for pigs and poul- 
 try. Thousands of quarters of barley change hands in Lincolnshire 
 every week, nearly all to waste. I have no time to carry this matter 
 far, or I should write to every paper in the Kingdom. ..." 
 
 But the papers are full of other things — of liquor-trade adver- 
 tisements, for example, inviting us to drink and squander our re- 
 sources, and to thank this patriotic trade for taking our food and 
 giving back its refuse heap. The very source of our strength this 
 trade consumes, and while a nation rocks and reels and stares at 
 famine coming, it goes on merrily. 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 THE LOST HUNDRED DAYS 
 
 It is not possible to measure the labor drink has stolen from this 
 country during the war, but it must be at least the equivalent of the" 
 whole United Kingdom standing idle for 100 days. 
 
 If that should seem incredible, let us put it at once on the firm 
 foundation of the Government's own figures. The War Savings 
 Committee, after spending thousands of pounds in asking women not 
 to wear veils or buy expensive laces, woke up five hundred mornings 
 late to the fact that our people were spending half a million pounds 
 a day on damaging the nation. It said so in a poster, and it said 
 this also — that not only should we save this enormous sum of money 
 by stopping drink, but the gain in national working capacity would 
 
 44
 
 THE LOST HUNDRED DAYS 
 
 be even greater. The loss of national working capacity, therefore, 
 according to this government department, is more than equivalent 
 to the drink bill- The drink bill since the war began is nearer 450 
 million pounds than 400 millions, but let us call it 400 million pounds 
 only. It is about one-tenth of the cost of the war so far — that is to 
 say, for every sovereign we have spent in fighting Germany we 
 have spent 2s. in fighting and weakening ourselves. 
 
 But let us subtract the unassailable truth from this statement 
 of the War Savings Committee. The war has cost us 4,000 million 
 pounds. That figure stands for the national working capacity of the 
 United Kingdom concentrated against her enemies- Very w^ell. 
 The drink trade has cost us 400 million pounds, and that figure 
 stands, on the Government's own showing, for the loss of national 
 working capacity against our enemies. We have, therefore, sacrificed 
 to drink one-tenth of our working capacity. There is no escape 
 from that, and it means, as the war is now 900 days old, that the 
 Government itself has estimated the price we pay for our war drink- 
 ing as ninety days of our national strength. 
 
 There is every reason to believe that this official estimate is con- 
 siderably below the truth; but if w^e take it as near the truth it is 
 ample warrant for the statement that the services rendered to Ger- 
 many by our drink trade equal the destruction of our total energies 
 for 100 days. 
 
 Let us look at the evidence this terrible statement has behind 
 it. It does not depend on the assumption that our workmen are a 
 drunken race. It suits this trade to put these words into our mouths, 
 but it is the trade itself that is never tired of saying that it lives 
 on moderate drinking, and it is moderate drinking as w^ell as drunk- 
 enness that destroys our national powers. But drunkenness itself, 
 without which the drink trade cannot thrive, has drawn its toll from 
 our workshops ; it keeps thousands of men from w^ar work every day 
 and interferes with the work of millions. As this is written the 
 Daily Mail — waking up two years late — complains of the loss of 6,000 
 hours a week through drink in a single port. There has not been 
 a day in these two years when these facts have not been crying for 
 the Daily Mail to publish them. 
 
 We shall never know the full truth of the famine in shells, or 
 how much of it was due to drink, but we do know that at that 
 crisis of the war drink was robbing the great industrial yards of 
 the North of one day's output a week, covering ships and guns and 
 shells as well. It was this that convinced the King that Prohibi- 
 tion must come. He knew, as the Commander-in-Chief said in a 
 
 45
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 letter to the nation a year later, that there must be "no slackening 
 of output for a moment." The words are weighted with destiny 
 for Britain and for Europe. More ammunition, says the Ministry 
 of Munitions, means more victories and fewer casualties- So the 
 workshop saves the trenches; there can be no big push in France 
 unless first of all we have had the big push at home. 
 
 The price of victory there is the spirit of the trenches here. 
 Men do not pause out there; the men who ofifer their lives are held 
 in discipline as in a vice, and are willing to be held. A man may 
 blush to think of it, but the thing most needed for a speedy triumph 
 of our arms" is that every man at home should do his utmost. One 
 hundred per cent of our workers hard at work, loo per cent of time 
 well kept — it is not much for Admiral Beatty and Sir Douglas Haig 
 to ask of us who are not with them, but it will put the power of vic- 
 tory in their grasp. 
 
 And yet what do we see? We have seen through all these ter- 
 rible months the spectre of fear in Downing street, afraid to ask of 
 us at home that stern discipline, that love of our country, that tire- 
 less zeal, that is asked of men in the field. They give their lives for 
 us ; to them we give our leisured lives. We are not working our 
 hardest; all through this war we have watched the waste of millions 
 of working days. They are the days that drink has stolen from us, 
 and they would be incredible if we could reckon them up. Let us 
 take a few actual cases ; they could be given by the hundred : 
 
 In one of the most important shell shops in England 25 per cent worked 
 under a normal day, 15 per cent worked under five days a week. Take a 
 week in a shipyard with 8,000 men. On three days over 900 were absent, 
 on two days nearly 900, on Saturday 600, and 1500 more lost a quarter every 
 day. Out of 50,000 days' work waiting for this yard that week 5500 were 
 thrown away. A submarine engine was being repaired by 135 men and 
 every day over twenty were absent. 
 
 In the critical days of last year in certain shipyards on the Clyde, the 
 lost time in one month was equal to 75,000 men idle for one day. It will be 
 said that that was long ago, that the Board of Control has been set up and 
 things are better now. Well, long after the Control Board, the manager of 
 one of the largest armament works reported that there had been no appre- 
 ciable saving of lost time; and it was in the middle of 1916 that the figures 
 for lost time in Sheffield reached their high-water mark. The total time lost 
 in one month was over 33,000 hours; and it was as if 500 of the best workmen 
 in Sheffield had struck work for a we'ek. 
 
 The truth is that all restrictions in drink have failed to solve the 
 problem of speeding up munitions. With all its good work to its 
 credit, the Board of Control has failed in the great industrial areas, 
 and it is still true, as Mr. Lloyd George said in 191 5, that by stop- 
 ping drink we add a vast army of men to our armament works 
 
 46
 
 THE LOST HUNDRED DAYS 
 
 "without spending one penny on additional structures, without put- 
 ting down a single additional machine, without adding to the su- 
 pervision of the men, but, on the contrary, lessening the supervision 
 — and all by one act of sacrifice on the part of the nation in order 
 to strengthen and wrest and win through to victory for our country." 
 It was the Prime Minister's opinion at that time that Prohibition 
 would have added lo per cent of man-power to our controlled works 
 alone — equal to the output of 90 days during the war. 
 
 Those words are still true ; and it is yet true, also, that there is 
 not a great power in Europe that would not rather have a thousand 
 guns and munitions than five divisions of infantry. All the Allies 
 need more steel, yet drink keeps down production; there are fur- 
 naces in this country that have had to be closed night after night 
 through drinking. We choose between drink and steel, public- 
 houses and furnaces, and the public-houses win again. 
 
 No man who knows the history of the Ministry of Munitions 
 can doubt that drink has held back guns and shells. There are 
 available for us all the facts published by the Government in official 
 papers, which so impressed the King that he prepared the way for 
 Prohibition .by telling the nation that "it is without doubt largely 
 due to drink that we are unable to secure the output of war material 
 indispensable to meet the requirements of our army." There is the 
 fact that manufacturers of high explosives warned the Government 
 that unless something were done to stop drinking they could not 
 deliver the goods. There is the fact that Colonel Von Donop was 
 informed by manufacturers of munitions that the delays due to 
 drinking affected everything — ships, guns and shells- There is the 
 fact that a deputation of shipbuilders and munition controllers in- 
 formed the Cabinet that they could not possibly .get their shops to 
 do justice to the men in the trenches unless drink were prohibited, 
 when work would "go with a swing" and "we should get the same 
 spirit in our workshops as in the trenches." There is the fact that 
 a munition firm begged the Government to close public-houses at 
 its gates so that they might increase their output of shells. There is 
 the fact that, while our men were dying in thousands for want of 
 machine guns, at least 500 drinking men were idling every day in 
 one works alone. There is the fact that, while hundreds of thousands 
 were idle through drink, one big firm could have doubled its output 
 of machine guns with the help of 75 men to fit up machinery lying 
 in its yard. 
 
 We fight our enemies with a broken arm. We stand beside 
 Russia and France with our power weakened bv an enemv at home. 
 
 47
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 It is a simple business proposition whether the British Empire, as 
 partner with France and Russia in this fight for the freedom of 
 Europe, is strong enough to win with only part of its strength. The 
 Commander-in-Chief of the Army knows how to deal with men who 
 fail him in the field ; it is on our honor at home to deal with those 
 who fail us behind the British lines. Without passion and without 
 prejudice, it must be stated that drink has robbed this country in 
 her hour of trial of a continuous power equal to hundreds of thou- 
 sands of men. What would they not have been worth at Loos, in 
 Mesopotamia or on Gallipoli? What would Lord Kitchener not 
 have given for them on that day when he found on his desk in White- 
 hall a desperate appeal from Sir Ian Hamilton for 100,000 men? 
 "If this help could be sent at once," it said, "we could still clear a 
 passage for our fleet to Constantinople." But Lord Kitchener had 
 not 100,000 men to send, though Prohibition would have given them 
 to him easily. 
 
 Always it is the lack of men that breaks down the plans of the 
 great commanders, and now, when the final blow is being prepared, 
 we have need of every able man. We dare not risk Bank Holidays, 
 but there would be no fear of holidays if public-houses were closed, 
 and drink takes heavier toll of us each day than any holiday with 
 Prohibition would ever do. We have added an hour of sunlight 
 to our working day in summer, but we have let drink steal a day 
 from our working week all through the year. 
 
 So this callous farce goes on. Our men push on and on and 
 ever on, and we — we give them such help as a private trade will let 
 us. We come up slowly with a millstone round our neck, and we 
 shout in a loud voice from the Mansion House that we believe in 
 this war to the last ounce of our strength. 
 
 If faith is measured by works, that is not true. We believe first 
 in the liberty of drink, and second in the liberty of Britain. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 INTERFERING WITH THE NAVY 
 
 The mightiest concentration of power on earth is the British 
 fleet, the fleet that we have built up with infinite toil and sacrifice 
 to guard this home of freedom. 
 
 No braver men have ever done their duty than they who man these 
 ships of ours. Can we ever forget the story of the drowning men 
 who clung to the wreckage as a battleship passed in hot pursuit of 
 the Germans in the battle of Jutland? They looked at the great 
 
 48
 
 INTERFERING WITH THE NAVY 
 
 ship speeding past them, and cheered her, and they sank down into 
 their watery grave. We have the ships, we have men like that, but, 
 alas! we have alcohol, too, and every day this trade is fighting 
 against the navy. In the North Sea battle, said the Times corre- 
 spondent, the German fleet must have outnumbered our own in tor- 
 pedo craft, of which our fleet was notoriously short. But why was 
 our fleet notoriously short of torpedo craft? It was short partly 
 because, for nearly i8 months before the naval battle, drink had 
 kept back the building of torpedo craft and the Government had ig- 
 nored the warning. Hundreds of warnings like that the Govern- 
 ment had, but this trade was more powerful than the interests of 
 the nation. 
 
 It is nearly two years since Adm.iral Tudor presented to the 
 Cabinet his terrible record of the efl^ect of drink on work being done 
 for the Admiralty ; and a week before that Admiral Jellicoe himself 
 had sent an urgent telegram begging that something should be done- 
 He hoped the Admiralty would not think. him "exceeding his sphere 
 of action," but the efficiency of the fleet was so aflFected that he felt 
 it his duty to wire. 
 
 That would seem evidence enough for the navy, but we have also 
 the complaints and warnings of Captain Greatorex, Director of Na- 
 val Equipment, who said the only solution suggested was to close, 
 partially or totally, all public-houses, and of Captain Barttelot, who 
 begged for some leading statesman to speak plainly on this subject, 
 and pleaded forcibly for the total Prohibition of spirits as "the most 
 effective act that could be taken to win the war," adding. "Any meas- 
 ure less drastic will not be a cure ; it will keep alive the craving 
 which has been growing after six months' indulgence, and some men 
 will endeavor to satisfy it by keeping away from work." The re- 
 ports of dozens of official investigators all tell the same terrible tale. 
 
 Let us see the sort of stories that we read in this grave official 
 chapter of how drink betrayed the British Navy ; they might be writ- 
 ten again today with equal truth. Here is the story of troops who 
 could not go to the front because drink held them back. A thousand 
 troops were waiting to go out; it was in the critical spring of 1915. 
 Some of them had traveled for 50 hours, from the other side of Ire- 
 land or Scotland, but they were kept waiting at Southampton for 
 a number of firemen ; and at last the ship came back into port, the 
 troops were put on another ship and they sailed 24 hours late. Think 
 what 24 hours late means in the trenches, and then think of this — 
 that drink was keeping back these men ; two of them lay drunk in 
 prison cells while these thousand troops were waiting for them. 
 
 49
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 The trenches were waiting for men, and drink was holding them 
 back. 
 
 Here is a story of a battleship that waited on a public-house- 
 The battleship was stranded and was being repaired. One day all 
 the riveters were away, but the foreman knew where to find them. 
 He went to a public-house and appealed to them in the name of their 
 comrades. The management went in the name of their employers. 
 The Government superintendent went in the name of the British 
 Navy. But every one of them went in vain ; the public-house was 
 pulling against the battleship, and the public-house won all the day. 
 
 Through all the months covered by this Government book that 
 tells these stories, these things were happening every week, and the 
 cause was always drink. The grand fleet was waiting for ships and 
 the drink trade was holding them back. A ship sailed down the 
 British Channel 33 men short ; its supplies were of such vital import- 
 ance that it had to go. But it could not get on- A slow ship is in 
 danger of submarines, and this ship had to call at ports on the way 
 to beg men to come and help it. We do not like this picture of the 
 British Navy calling like a tout for labor at our ports, wasting time 
 and risking safety on the way to the grand fleet, but that is the way 
 of the fleet at home; that is how we guard this fleet that guards our 
 homes. It is happening still ; it happens every week. 
 
 It would not be surprising if the Admiralty, guardian of the 
 most- efficient force within this realm, had not burned with shame 
 at this betrayal, and warning after warning the AJmiralty sent 
 to the Cabinet. It appointed a Director of Transport. We all re- 
 member how Mr. Churchill announced his discovery in Parliament; 
 the papers were full of Mr. Graeme Thompson. Well, Mr. Thomp- 
 son looked into the matter and found out what was wrong, and al- 
 most the first thing he told the Admiralty was that it was necessary, 
 for the efficiency of the army and the navy, to withdraw all licenses 
 throughout the Kingdom. The Admiralty itself, in one final state- 
 ment, urged upon the Cabinet the only perfect remedy of this grave 
 problem — total Prohibition. It is no reply to say, as is often said, 
 that all these things were long ago, and that drink restrictions have 
 stopped them. They have not. The transport trouble is with us 
 still, as all the drink troubles in the nation are, and a Dockers' Bat- 
 talion has had to be formed to deal with them at the docks. It has 
 succeeded as well as that experiment two years ago at Havre, when 
 the Admiralty was compelled to replace a gang of drunken dockers 
 with disciplined men on whom drink could not work its will. Ex- 
 perience has shown throughout the war that, wherever bold action 
 
 50
 
 OUR WASTED MILLIONS 
 
 is taken, it pays. The insolent power of drink beyond control is 
 the enemy of the navy everywhere, but the Admiralty's own dock- 
 yards show that even drink succumbs before strong men who mean 
 to have their way. The men of the Dockers' Battalion, unsoddened 
 in alcohol, will often work 80 hours in a week against the usual 
 docker's 53. It is chiefly drink that robs us of the other 27. 
 
 While this page is being written, at the end of 1916, 100 men are 
 in gaol in Liverpool for failing to join their ships, and the reason 
 given is that the men on whom we are depending now are always 
 "over-beered," as Edison says, and, therefore, not reliable. Many 
 liners have lately been delayed, 50 firemen being missing once in the 
 port of Liverpool alone. The Chairman of the War Committee of 
 that port, and the Naval Transport Officer, are both in favor of to- ^ 
 tal Prohibition. They know the facts. They know that men go 
 about their ships so drunk that they must be led along the gang- 
 ways. They know that, even in the year 1917, if a ship is delayed 
 until the public-houses open it is sure to lose part of its crew; they 
 know that public-houses hold back ships as if it were the business 
 they were paid to do. They know that last October alone sixteen 
 vessels were delayed in Liverpool for want of men ; they know that 
 among the 70,000 men in this important port drink is the greatest 
 danger that exists ; and they know quite well that no restriction short 
 of Prohibition ever can remove it. 
 
 For two years now the coming and going of our troops, the dis- 
 patch of supplies, the transport of stores by road and rail and sea, 
 has been greatly interfered with. It is one of the most effective of 
 all the ways in which the German army has been helped by agents 
 outside its own ranks. It is time we stopped this fooling and took 
 this brake off our wheels. 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 OUR WASTED MILLIONS 
 
 The greatest single item in the expenditure of the British people 
 during the war has done not a thing to strengthen England, but has 
 weakened it from hour to hour. 
 
 We have spent over 400 million pounds in drink since the war 
 began. Every sovereign spent today that does rot strengthen Eng- 
 land weakens it, and we see the greatest item of our national ex- 
 penditure, a stupendous sum hardly to be grasped, spent in these 
 terrible times without producing one single atom of health, or 
 strength, or power, or wealth, or any other virtue for this country. 
 
 51
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 Our people are earning high wages, but they have never been 
 trained in spending or in thrift— God knows they have never had the 
 chance to spend or save till now, and we "can hardly blame them ; 
 but what are we to say of a nation that puts its people in sudden 
 possession of abundant means, and sees this wealth turned against 
 
 itself? 
 
 It is Mr. Kindersley, the Chairman of the War Savings Com- 
 mittee, who says that every pound spent now unnecessarily is a be- 
 trayal 'of those who are fighting for us, and we may well ask Mr. 
 Kindersley to hand on to the Cabinet this ofificial admission — that we 
 have spent 400 million pounds since the war began in betraying those 
 who are fighting for us. The Government appeals to the people for 
 economy, but no nation with an intellectual self-respect will believe 
 it necessary to economize while we can throw half a million pounds 
 a day into a hundred thousand public-houses. This trade offers 
 beer and whisky, the seeds of British weakness, and our people run 
 to buy; the Government offers liberty and the peace of Britain if 
 we will economize, and there is almost no response- 
 
 It is not unnatural, it is the natural fruit of the seed we have sown 
 for 50 years and more. This drink waste has alv/ays 'been with us ; 
 through all the years of peace when we haggled about the old-age 
 pensions of the poor we were throwing away millions every week 
 on drink. And now, with the greatest money crisis in our history 
 facing us, with our spending on the war at the incredible sum of 
 six million pounds a day, we go on drinking Niagaras of gold. 
 
 Drink costs us a million pounds a day. Our people spend on 
 it £500,000 a day, and the controlling and managing of drink and its 
 results costs us at least £500,000 more. In times of financial stress 
 like this the dead load of the capital in drink is like a millstone 
 everywhere. If we could transfer this £200,000,000 to almost any- 
 thing else the people of this country would not know the land they 
 were born in, so prosperous would it be. 
 
 The national drink bill during the war has reached, over £400,- 
 000,000. We must have spent more money on drink than on shells. 
 - We must have poured more of our financial strength into this trade 
 since August, 1914, than we have fired away in France. We have 
 spent on drink since war began enough to provide £2 a week for 
 every British home that has lost a bread-winner in the war. 
 
 We give a private trade the power to waste this wealth of ours, 
 to drain our people's savings, and scatter our resources, and break 
 down our reserves, for the sake of a miserable pittance that it pays 
 in taxes- The British Government takes a million pounds a week 
 
 52
 
 SHIPS, DOCKS AND TRAINS 
 
 from this trade in drink, and every member of it knows that it is 
 traitor money, paid for the right to play the Kaiser's game of weak- 
 ening England. What madness is it that- pays £6,000,000 a day to 
 beat our enemy and takes £1,000,000 a week from this enemy 
 power at home? We must fight the Germans, clearly; we will 
 :~pend £6,000,000 a day on fighting them, but if some power that 
 does not love us much will give us £1,000,000 a week we will fight 
 the Germans not quite so hard. We have come to that. 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 SHIPS, DOCKS AND TRAINS 
 
 We live on a little island ; we depend on the outer world for most 
 of our vital needs and for five loaves in every six we eat; we have 
 not one foot of shipping space to spare; our wheat and sugar and 
 paper supplies are all cut down; yet we let this drink trade use up 
 hundreds of millions of cubic feet of space in ships, congest our docks 
 and streets and railways, and use up the labor of hundreds of thou- 
 sands of men. 
 
 . . If we could solve the shipping problem we could laugh at every- 
 thing, even at bad harvests; and yet this trade in drink has swal- 
 lowed up a fleet of great ships working all the time. Australia 
 bought up all her wheat and offered it to us, but we had no ships 
 to fetch it; India had a great wheat surplus, but there were no ships 
 to bring it ; and so the loaf went up to ninepence and to tenpence. 
 Books and magazines must sufifer, and we must have economy in 
 knowledge as in sugar; the food of the mind and the food of the 
 body too must go, so that this enemy trade may be reinforced with 
 constantly fresh supplies. The Transport Workers' Federation will 
 not be suspected of fanatical sympathies with temperance, but it is 
 nearly two years since it begged the Government to take decisive 
 action about drink in the interests of national well-being- 
 
 And no ^vonder. On land and sea this enemy power has 
 blocked our way ; it hinders the building of new ships, it slows down 
 the speed of those we have and increases their danger from sub- 
 marines; it uses up shipping space that would bring in millions of 
 tons of food, and all the time it hinders and cripples our transport 
 everywhere. 
 
 Even if we take merely the moving of this trade's materials 
 from place to place in the United Kingdom, the feeding of our pub- 
 lic-houses has involved during the war the lifting and handling on 
 road and rail of a weight equal at least to 60 million tons. We have 
 
 53
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 not men enough to carry on the war, but we have men enough to 
 lift and move from place to place a weight of drink stufif every year 
 three times as heavy as the Great Pyramid. 
 
 Think of it! We are at war with Germany; we are gasping 
 for man-power. We have a trade that robs us of men and hinders 
 us in all we do, and we have let this trade use up, since war began, 
 the labor of lifting 60 million tons. It took a hundred thousand 
 men a generation to set up the Great Pyramid, but if we had pulled 
 it down and set it up again three times since war began, that would 
 have taken less labor than the shifting of this drink stuff that ships 
 pour everlastingly into our docks. Think of the London docks, the 
 greatest gathering-place of goods in the world; the whole earth 
 pours its treasures into them. Well, every year this drink trade 
 wastes more tons of precious stuff than the Port of London handles. 
 Put all the stuff emptied at the docks of London in one scale, and 
 the coal and food used up by drink in another, and drink weighs 
 down the docks. Or come to the railways. It was suggested at 
 Christmas that the soldiers should not have their Christmas leave, 
 m order to relieve the railways ; but the drink stuff carried on our 
 railways in one week would equal all the soldiers in the Kingdom 
 going home. Every week the drink stuff on our railways fills over 
 1,000 trains of 200 tons apiece. 
 
 We are gasping for man-power; we are hampered by the pres- 
 sure on our railways and threatened by the scarcity of ships; but 
 drink sits down and mocks at us. Getting and spending, it lays 
 waste OUT powers. Meanwhile, we tL'lk of stopping the transport 
 of stuff for chocolates tied with ribbons. 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 WINNING AND LOSING 
 
 We have thrown away the winning power of the war. Into 
 that ditch where our great Allies have flung their powers of weak- 
 ness we have flung our strength. In a ditch in France lies absinthe; 
 in a ditch in Russia lies vodka ; but beer and whisky swagger through 
 the streets of Britain, and in the ditch we fling the power of victory. 
 
 We have only to look, on the one hand, at what alcohol has 
 done for the Allies, and, on the other hand, at what Prohibition has 
 done for them, to realize how Prohibition, for which we wait and 
 wait in Britain, has held the fort for liberty while we make up our 
 
 minds- 
 Consider, first, the contribution of Russia to the cause of human 
 
 54
 
 WINNING AND LOSING 
 
 freedom. By one bold moral stroke she has surprised the world. 
 She has had two great wars in the lifetime of her little children- 
 one with drink on her back, when she staggered to the depths of de- 
 feat, and one with drink beneath her feet, when she rises to the very 
 pinnacle of pride. 
 
 What has Russia done? She has saved Paris. She has saved 
 her own people from degeneration and decay; she has given them 
 the power of saving much more in a week without drink than they 
 saved in a year with drink. She has saved her revenue from a 
 foundation of sinking sand to set it on a rock. She has, in the 
 midst of times like this, for the first time in her history burst through 
 her walls of ice and found a free way to the ever-open sea. It is in 
 the midst of this fearful war, while she flings back the German hosts 
 and sets Asia free' from Prussian peril, that Russia has achieved 
 the mighty conquest of her dreams. Her age-long struggle has 
 been for a free way to the ocean. The Siberian Railway takes her 
 to the ice-bound port of Vladivostock ; the railway to Archangel 
 leads to ice again; the Baltic is frozen over nearly half the year, 
 and the only open way in winter is at the mercy of the Turk. But 
 so strong is Russia under Prohibition that, even with the war of 
 Europe on her hands, she bursts the v/alls of ice that have baffled 
 her for centuries, and she builds a railway through a territory dark 
 and cold for months, through untrodden forests and marshy wastes, 
 hlling up swamps and blasting gigantic rocks, working in a sun- 
 less land with fires and lamps that are never out, until she reaches 
 at last the first ever-open gate that an Empire of the Tzar has 
 ever known. 
 
 Such unthinkable power has Prohibition Russia, such things has 
 Russia done- She gave to the Allies the greatest key to victory 
 that she could forge — Prohibition. She struck down vodka at a 
 single blow, she gave her local authorities power to stop the sale 
 of every form of alcohol, and she is stronger now than ever before 
 because you can go through Russia from one end to another and see 
 tiot a drop of alcohol. 
 
 But Russia has done more than that ; she has done great things 
 for Europe, too. Upon Russia, despotic Russia, it has fallen to 
 guard and save our liberties. 
 
 The highest authorities do not doubt that Prohibition has saved 
 her from internal revolution, and with Russia in revolution what 
 course would the war have taken? Freed from the pressure from 
 the East, how far towards her goal of conquering Europe would 
 Germany now have been? 
 
 SS
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 Such, for Russia, is the difference between controlling alcohol 
 and being controlled by it, and for Europe it has meant that Ger- 
 many is beaten, for with Russia strong Germany has not been able 
 to withdraw her troops from the East and win her way to Calais. 
 
 But it is not in Russia alone that we have seen the mighty 
 fruits of Prohibition in the war. We have seen it in France, where 
 the war goes on unceasingly against this alcohol that Genesal Joffre 
 has called "a crime against national defense." General GalHeni 
 fought it hard in Paris, as Jofifre has fought it everywhere- The 
 President and the Premier of France are its sworn enemies. They 
 hate this thing that lives on the vices of their people and grows rich 
 as France grows poor. And so France followed the Tsar. She 
 struck down absinthe, her chief foe; she stopped the sale of spirits 
 to soldiers and women and young people, and even as these words 
 are written she takes another great step forward towards total Pro- 
 hibition, for she is to stop the sale of spirits everywhere. It will be 
 worth more than a new army to France, a great French statesman 
 has said. 
 
 And what has been the end of this resolve of France? France, 
 too, has surprised the world. It is true to say that each of the three 
 great Allies has surprised mankind, but it is true, alas, to say that, 
 while France and Russia have surprised us in their strength, it has 
 been in her moral weakness that Britain has surprised the world. 
 Never will history forget Verdun, and that spirit of a new-born 
 France that gathered there and held the fort when every Frenchman 
 there thought it would fall. There is no limit to the power of a 
 nation that throws out its vices. 
 
 But let us come again to Paris. There have been two wonders 
 of Paris in the war, the wonder that it was saved at all, and the won- 
 der that its babies were saved in some almost miraculous way. It 
 was the fight against alcohol that saved both the city and its chil- 
 dren- When the enemy were almost at the gates of Paris, with the 
 shadow of defeat falling over the city, Paris had to save her babies 
 from such a death-rate as might have shocked the world. And she 
 saved them. While the babies of Edinburgh were dying as never 
 before, Paris won for herself the enduring distinction, in the first 
 year of the war, of the lowest infant death-rate ever recorded in her 
 history, and she did it by giving her babies the milk that drink steals 
 from our babies at home, and by prohibiting the sale of absinthe and 
 spirits to mothers. She saw the patli of victory, and she chose to 
 go that way. 
 
 The thrilling declaration of M. Briand against alcohol is fresh 
 
 56
 
 WINNING AND LOSING 
 
 in the mind of the world, and on the walls of every postof!ice in 
 France the Government has ordered to be exhibited another decla- 
 ration, signed by the President, calling on those who love France 
 to honor the memory of their dead by fighting alcohol. It is a 
 great document, which one touch of French courage in Downing 
 street might translate, word for word, for the walls of every post- 
 ofilice in this country, too. Here is part of this declaration by our 
 great Ally, the conquerer of V'erdun : 
 
 To French Women and to Young Frenchmen 
 
 Drink is as much 3'our enemy as Germany. 
 
 Since 1870 it has cost France in men and money much more than the 
 present war. 
 
 Drinkers age quickly. They lose half their normal life, and fall easy 
 victims to many infirmities and illnesses. 
 
 The seductive drinks of your parents reappear in their offspring as great 
 hereditary evils. France owes to alcohol a great many mad men and women 
 and consumptives, and most of her criminals. 
 
 Drink decreases by two-thirds our national production; it raises the cost 
 of living and increases poverty. 
 
 In imitation of the criminal Kaiser, drink decimates and ruins France, 
 to the great delight of Germany. 
 
 Mothers, young men, young girls, wives! Up and act against drink in 
 memory of those who have glorious^' died or suffered wounds for the 
 Fatherland! You will thus accomplish a mission as great as that of our 
 heroic soldiers. 
 
 Let us turn to Italy- War moves slowly now^adays, but among 
 Alpine peaks most slowly of all. Yet it is there that the greatest 
 physical feats of the war have been accomplished — the carrying of 
 guns up to these heights in face of enemy lire, the fortifying of these 
 mighty peaks, so high that men shiver and freeze by glaciers in 
 whose beds their comrades below bathe in warm waters. Conditions 
 of war indeed are these, and what is it that helps these men to en- 
 dure them? It is Prohibition once again — Prohibition of spirits 
 throughout the Italian army. As on the great Russian frontiers, as 
 in Paris and at Verdun, so at Gorizia Prohibition brings the strength 
 that wins. 
 
 So we find it in the British Empire, too ; we find it almost 
 everywhere save in our Motherland. It was Prohibition that made 
 the Anzacs fit — every Anzac comes to us from a Prohibition camp. 
 It was Prohibition that made the Canadians fit. From Prohibition 
 camps in Prohibition ships they came to us. Partial or total Pro- 
 hibition of some kind there must be against this foe of health and 
 strength. Everywhere but in Britain we find the Allies fighting 
 this great foe, and here we fight it with brave words and leave it 
 free for its foul deeds. We take what Prohibition sends us ; whether 
 
 57
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 Anzacs from New Zealand or shells from Canada and the United 
 States, whether powerful blows for liberty in the East or soul-stirring 
 courage at the gates of Verdun, we take it and thank God for it — 
 and we go on drinking. 
 
 The great war of Europe will be slowly lost and won- The 
 great concentration of material powers will wear down Germany at 
 last ; but he has little vision who sees the power of victory in guns 
 and shells. Victory lies not in these things; it lies in things that 
 are behind them. It is the moral strength of the Allies that will 
 win. It gives them the sympathy of the civilized world; it gives 
 them the inexhaustible man-power of Russia. It gives them the 
 'dauntless spirit of Joan of Arc in France again. It gives them the 
 solid phalanx of the British peoples. It opens up to them the ever- 
 lasting resources of the earth. It is because the Allies stand on the 
 rock of eternal justice that they have these things- 
 
 And what have been the great moral contributions to the win- 
 ning power of the Allies? In all our allied countries are things 
 that win and things that lose, and we owe it to our sense of honor 
 to put down among us the things that lose, and to put our trust 
 in things that win. We owe it to ourselves and to our Allies to 
 adopt the plain and simple policy of conscription of all the elements 
 of victory and Prohibition of all the elements of defeat. The plain 
 truth is that Britain has not yet, after thirty months of war, put 
 away from her those forces in her midst that work against the 
 Allies ; not for one hour since war began has our full strength been 
 thrown against our foes. 
 
 While our great Allies have cast their enemy from them, have 
 gone into this arena with alcohol beneath their feet or in their grip, 
 we move on slowly with alcohol on our backs. But we do not win 
 like that. 
 
 We shall win the war when we pay the ^rice of victory. We 
 shall win when we who stay at home are worthy of the trenches. 
 We do not deserve to win till then. 
 
 The men who lead the army and the men who lead the fleet 
 kjiow quite well the truth about drink — they knew quite 
 well what they could do if Britain were but free from 
 this enemy at home. They know that drink has hampered them 
 and hindered them and kept back shells, and some of them have 
 seen its work in Belgium. We know what drink has done for Bel- 
 gium ; all the world knows how the refuse of the German army, 
 soddened with drink, turned beautiful towns into shambles, slashed 
 women with their swords, and shot down children. A bitter price 
 
 58
 
 WINNING AND LOSING 
 
 did Belgium pay for the stuff she left in her cellars- And yet, with 
 a drunken army like that, the Germans were not far from Paris, 
 and a British General writes to me that he wonders whether, had 
 the Germans employed men in each unit to destroy all alcohol on 
 the lines of march, they would have taken Paris. We may be thank- 
 ful to alcohol, or to any other kind of deviltry, that will keep the 
 Germans back, but alcohol that can keep the Germans back from 
 Paris can keep a Briton or a Frenchman from the Rhine. 
 
 There remains to be written that vital contribution to the his- 
 tory of the world which will tell the part that aifohol has played in 
 human history by confusing the brains of men, and a terrible chapter 
 such a book must give to this war. We have only to pick up . a 
 paper like the Lancet, and we find a naval surgeon writing of men 
 who shoot Niagara with their eyes shut. Inadvisable in peace time, 
 says Dr. W. E. Home, surgeon of the fleet, indulgence in alcohol 
 is suicide now- 
 
 Think of the responsibilities of today, especially those of public servants, 
 a captain in the trenches, the commander of a destroyer, a Cabinet Minister. 
 Why should they drink? To compensate them for the strain of their 
 anxieties? It is pleasant; it is an anaesthetic. Will the enjoyment of that 
 small sensuous pleasure make up to them or will it compensate us, their em- 
 ployers or their beneficiaries, for preceptions delayed, decisions slowed, one 
 gunfire wasted, a ship lost, an opportunity unseized? 
 
 "Why is everyone so friendly to drinkers?" Dr. Home asks 
 again ; and he tells this story of a distinguished officer to whom he 
 was talking of the death of a brother officer with whom both had 
 served : 
 
 "He drank a bit," said I. "Yes," said the other, "but I could never catch 
 him; everybody shielded him." And I recalled to myself an occasion when 
 A was "under the influence" and some half-dozen officers stood round him 
 to shield him from possible notice by our captain near by. Yet his failing 
 might have drowned us any night. 
 
 It was not long ago at Dover that the Admiral in command in- 
 formed the magistrates that a publican who had sold whisky to a 
 sailor might have been "the direct cause of the loss of lives of many 
 of our countrymen." Another case appears in the newspapers on 
 the day this book is being written — on New Year's Day, 1917. The 
 captain of a large British ship was put in irons by his crew, kept 
 a prisoner in his cabin, and fed through a porthole; and the charge 
 that was brought against him, on the word of nine witnesses for 
 the Admiralty, was that the captain was often dangerously drunk, 
 and that on December 8, 1916, under the influence of drink, he sighted 
 a British hospital ship and ordered the chief gunner to fire on it. 
 On being reminded that the ship was our own hospital ship, the 
 
 59
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 captain replied that he did not care, and repeated the order, which 
 the gunner refused to obey. 
 
 Are we fit for the solemn powers that lie within our hands, are 
 we worthy of the dauntless spirit of the British army and the British 
 fleet, are we honorable men and an honorable nation, while we send 
 our hospital ships to sea and allow this private trade to send to sea 
 the stuff that would turn our guns on them? We say what we say 
 of the German submarines that sink our hospital ships, but what 
 shall we say of this alcohol that threatens them? What shall we 
 say of this British trade whose natural and logical end is to fuddle 
 the brains of men at sea and double the perils of the submarine? 
 What difference is there in the world between the Prussian deviltry 
 that sank the Lusitania and the drink trade deviltry that would sink 
 our wounded men? The difference is that we execrate and seek to 
 exterminate the one, while we tolerate and seek to palliate the other. 
 
 And the work of this trade is like that everywhere. The truth 
 is past believing by those who do not know through long experience. 
 We talk of the horrors of slavery, but the horrors of drink are not 
 less, and they are with us still. It is Admiral Jellicoe himself who 
 has told ^us that drink muddles the aim of a man at a gun and re- 
 duces his efficiency by about one-third. It is Sir Frederick Treves 
 who watched the men drop out on the march to the relief of Lady- 
 smith, and found that every man who dropped out was a drinker — 
 so that drink opposed the relief of I.adysmith as it opposed the 
 relief of Belgium. But there is no end to the evidence of these 
 weighty things, and there must be an end of a book- We learn 
 from the annual meeting of Allsopps that the drinking soldier is 
 worth two teetotalers, and we must spare a line to admire the mili- 
 rary experience at an Allsopp meeting which knows so much better 
 than Kitchener and French and Wolseley and Roberts and Joffre ; 
 and we must find room, also^ for one word more on the part that 
 drink has played in the War of Europe. 
 
 A soldier-doctor whose name will be immortal. Sir Victor 
 Horsley, went out to Mesopotamia and gave his life for his country. 
 He found a shortage of drinking water, but there were whisky and 
 champagne in the very few transports that arrived ; and Sir Victor 
 Horsley found that in that torrid climate the military authorities, 
 understanding medicine better than he, issued rum instead of food 
 and sterile waterr, with the result that they spread cholera, diarrhoea 
 and dysentery. The army, we must gather from this, was spreading 
 disease and weakness in its ranks. "No one would suppose that a 
 military medical history had ever been written or published," Sir 
 
 60
 
 FOOLING WITH THE ENEMY 
 
 Victor Horsley wrote in one of his very' last letters, and he added 
 these deliberate words which may well be printed now, written as 
 they were by the greatest surgeon of the human brain who ever 
 lived: "Our gross failures and stupidity are, in my opinion, due to 
 ?lcohol affecting the intellectual organs and clearness of our lead- 
 ers. Of course, they do not realize that alcohol in small doses acts 
 as a brake on their brains." 
 
 There are wide questions opened up by such facts as these from 
 the fighting fronts. That is the way of drink. Its grip is every- 
 where- In peace it clogs the wheels of progress; in war it slows 
 down victory. A long time, perhaps, Germany can hold out against 
 a Britain fighting with part of her strength. 
 
 We can end the war sooner or later ; we can throw into it the 
 whole of our strength ; we can put on our whole armor against the 
 destroyers of Belgium, the assassins of Edith Cavell and the mas- 
 ters of Ruhleben ; or we can let things take their course, and go on 
 drinking. 
 
 Chapter xii 
 
 FOOLING WITH THE ENEMY 
 
 For two years and more we have been fooling with drink in this 
 country, playing with a traitor worse than Constantine. What are 
 we going to do? At last we have a Government in Downing street 
 of men who dare to face a fact, and they see this traitor face to face. 
 It is the Prime Minister himself who has told us that this trade is 
 worse than German}'-, that we can never settle ^vith Germany until 
 we have settled with drink, and that if only we settle with drink 
 the war will have paid for itself. Well, Mr. Lloyd George has his 
 chance. Let him settle this question now ; let him save this country 
 from this stain; let him remember now the facts he told the King. 
 Let him remember now the noble stand he made when a stone wall 
 was in his way. Let him bid his Government listen to the truth 
 that claps like thunder through the state. 
 
 We draw near to the greatest triumph the armies of freedom 
 have ever won upon the earth, and it lies within our power to make 
 the way short or long, final or inconclusive- It is the golden oppor- 
 tunity of the Allies to bring an enduring peace to Europe by crush- 
 ing forever the malignant power that has brought these things upon 
 us ; but for such a victory, complete and overwhelming, we must 
 put forth the last ounce of our strength. Less than that must mean 
 a war prolonged, casualties increased, and an indecisive peace. Full 
 
 61
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 strength now means a shorter war, and a mighty victory which will 
 leave the Allies masters of Europe with their strength unbroken. 
 
 And it is Britain that has power, by one decisive act, to turn 
 the scale and lift up the heart of the world. She has resources un- 
 dreamed of; she has, still waiting to be released, a force that would 
 stagger her foes ; she has a reserve of physical and moral and finan- 
 cial strength such as no nation has ever before been able to set free 
 by one bold stroke. Thrown into the field in this great hour, it 
 would lift up our men, hearten our Allies and bring back countless 
 men who otherwise will never see this land again. 
 
 Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide. 
 Twice it has come to us- The Lost Opportunity is back again. The 
 insistent appeal of humanity, the stern necessities and example of 
 the Allies, the pleading and example of the Empire; the claims of 
 the future — of men in the trenches, women in the homes, children in 
 the schools; the bitter needs of war, the glorious hope of freedom, 
 call upon us now. Shall we be deaf to them all, and dumb before 
 the world in the presence of this cancer that consumes our powers? 
 What good is an expanding Empire to a declining race? 
 
 We have played with this evil in peace and played with it in 
 war, and it plays with us on the edge of the abyss. It is in league 
 with all the elements of defeat, disease and death; and shall we 
 play with it longer? It is time we struck it down, time we ended 
 talk with deeds, time we were worthy of the opportunity that comes 
 from God to men. We complain to the civilized world that the 
 Germans drove the Belgian people's cattle to feed the German 
 armies, that they seized the people's food supplies and raw materials ; 
 but this trade has been doing these things all the time in Britain. 
 Though it has enough whisky to last us five years, it destroys our 
 food to make still more; the food of today is turned into whisky 
 for 1921. There are spirits enough to last us years, though Britain 
 should drink to the dregs 'and sink to the level of a third-rate power ; 
 yet this trade must go on making it, using up labor and poisoning 
 food and robbing our soldiers of sugar. We have not men enough 
 to dig up coal for our ships and factories and homes, and so we 
 bring our miners back from France ; but this trade uses up the whole 
 time of 6,000 miners and has wasted millions of tons of coal since 
 the war began. We have not enough skilled mechanics in our work- 
 shops, and so we bring them back from France ; but this trade de- 
 prives us of the strength of tens of thousands of mechanics. It is 
 two years since the controllers of munitions in the greatest area of 
 the United Kingdom told the Government how to add a day a week 
 
 62
 
 FOOLING WITH THE ENEMY 
 
 to its industrial strength by stopping drink, but almost nothing has 
 been done. 
 
 It is not surprising that the neutral world should talk of peace. 
 We have peace maneuvers in America, surely, because America 
 does not believe v^e are in earnest It is hard to think a nation can 
 be serious that fights the German Empire with a millstone round its 
 neck ; it is hard to believe that a nation is in earnest which leaves 
 her Allies alone to put forth their moral strength. It is hard to be- 
 lieve that Britain who freed the slaves can be in earnest as she sits 
 with her material powers about her, longing and yearning, yet 
 afraid to rise to the moral height of mighty Russia, and of France, 
 the nation they told us had "thrown over God." 
 
 It was said of one who lived and died for England in other 
 days that "yoi-^ h^yt so lived and wrought as to keep the soul alive 
 in England." Let us pray it may be said of us. Our people have 
 not the thrill of battle to urge them forward, they do not feel the 
 terrible inspiration of the German guns ; but they love their country, 
 and it is the duty of the Government to lead the way of sacrifice. 
 We have come once more to where the Admiralty stood in its wis- 
 dom in March, 191 5, when, realizing its grave responsibility to the 
 British people and the Allied cause, it urged upon the Cabinet the 
 only real solution of the peril in which the nation stood. "Total 
 Prohibition," the Admiralty said to the Cabinet, "with all its attend- 
 ant objections and disadvantages, would at least have the general 
 effect that all classes would at last realize the existence and serious- 
 ness of the war, and that they were personally involved in its con- 
 sequences." Even then the Admiralty foresaw the final argument 
 to which the nation and the Government are coming after two long 
 
 years. 
 
 We have to rouse once more among our people that spirit of 
 self-sacrifice, that solemn vision of a mighty destiny, with which 
 they set out on this terrible journey to the goal that will fix the 
 peace of Europe forever. We have to save from waste the energy 
 that wins, but we have to save from deep despair the soul of our 
 people. 
 
 One thing does not seem to matter very much : it does not mat- 
 ter much how this is done. If it is best to stop drink slowly, with 
 drink tickets for a week or two, let us have drink tickets. If it is 
 better to stop spirits entirely and make light beers, let us stop spirits 
 and make light beers. If it is better to guarantee the dividends of 
 this ghastly trade as we do for the railways, let us guarantee the 
 dividends. If it is better to nationalize the trade and stop it after- 
 
 63
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 wards, let us nationalize the trade. Drink in every country on the 
 earth has one tremendous purpose. To all mankind it says, Your 
 money and your life ! It is taking life and money too from us. If 
 we must pay the price to save our lives, then, in the name of Britain 
 and of Freedom, let us pay the price. This drink trade is the na- 
 tion's sin- Sin will have its wages, and the way of transgressors 
 is hard. 
 
 But it will not do to nationalize this trade to make a profit out 
 of it. Nations do not keep clean like that. You do not make a 
 poison pure when. a great lady sells it; it is the same stuflF that a bar- 
 maid sells in a slum. Mr. Gladstone stained his name by trying to 
 make the sale of drink respectable, and he left us a degraded woman- 
 hood. Russia tried this way, and gave it up to win the war. We 
 shall not be such fools as to think we can win the war by picking 
 up the thing that Russia threw down. 
 
 It is not true that the nation is unready for whatever sacrifice 
 will win- It- is a great illusion to imagine that what is possible in 
 other countries is impossible in this. 
 
 The problem was not simpler for Russia ; her revenue from al- 
 cohol was greater than ours. Millions of her peasants were slaves 
 to it and soddened with it, and she had in stock 140 million gallons 
 of vodka when the war broke out. But she revolutionized her 
 finances and found her revenue elsewhere, she gave her people bet- 
 ter things to do and something more to live for than drinking like 
 mere animals, and she turned her vodka into synthetic rubber. So 
 great has been her recovery that it is said that, should she lose 
 500,000 lives, she will make good within ten years. China has 
 thrown out opium by the same bold stroke, and even Mexico has 
 risen to the moral height of stopping her bull-fights in these last 
 few months. The problem was not easier for France ; she had a 
 spit-bar for every 90 people and more than a million workers in dis- 
 tilleries. Her people drank a million gallons of absinthe every 
 week. The problem was not easier for Italy, enslaved to poverty 
 as her people were, spending their energies in growing and making 
 alcohol for themselves to drink. Yet she has sent her men up 
 mountain peaks with spirits prohibited all the way, and in her towns 
 she has shut up 15,000 drink-shops. 
 
 But it is said our people would not stand it. In the face of the 
 German army we have tinkered with our foes at home. We have 
 listened to all the arguments and fears, and shut our eyes to the 
 facts. On what authority is it said that our people will not tolerate 
 
 64
 
 FOOLING WITH THE ENEMY 
 
 Prohibition? We have been told for years they would not let you 
 shut their public-houses. We have seen the House of Commons 
 quail for years before these brewers with their coronets and their 
 great subscriptions to the party fund. But the Board of Control 
 has answered that forever; it has shut up public-houses for twelve 
 or thirteen hours a day, and nobody has grumbled. Through all 
 these years that Parliament did nothing our Governments were 
 frightened by a ghost. 
 
 We are told that labor would not stand it. But the vote of 
 600,000 co-operators in Scotland, when only 30 delegates in 800 
 were against it, is an adequate answer to that- There are names on 
 the Strength of Britain Memorial that are an answer to that. The 
 appeal of the Transport Workers' Federation is an answer to that. 
 At a Government conference between masters and men in one of 
 the worst districts the delegates of the men declared that "three- 
 quarters of us here are Prohibitionists." There is no basis in fact 
 for this fear of labor that keeps in powder the trade that prolongs 
 the war. 
 
 We are told that there will be strikes if drink is stopped. But 
 we were told the same about conscription and about the Derby 
 scheme, and our men have proved themselves as ready as the Gov- 
 ernment to make the sacrifice. Even if it were not so the stopping 
 of trades-union pay w^ould stop all strikes. 
 
 We are told that men see the need for conscription but will not 
 realize the need for Prohibition, that they w^ould not give up the 
 thing they have been used to all their lives. But our men have been 
 quite equal to any situation that has been explained to them. They 
 have been walling to suspend trade-union rules for which they have 
 fought for years. They have accepted even the dilution of labor 
 and the employment of military labor in civil occupations. 
 
 We are told our farmers need brewers' grains and that bakers 
 need their yeast. It is not true. The brewer takes five pounds of 
 good barley and leaves the farmer one pound of bad; and the best 
 bakers make their own yeast. 
 
 We are told that it would be dangerous suddenly to break the 
 habit of a lifetime, and that thousands would not be able to work at 
 all if drink were stopped. But in any case there is no need to 
 stop drink suddenly. It could be stopped in stages, with drink 
 tickets for a week or two, or we could stop the sale of spirits and 
 leave light beers which would gradually fall below the limit of the 
 excise. But the truth is that any danger such as this has been 
 easily overcome elsewhere. It could be met by giving men hot 
 
 65 .
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 drinks in industrial canteens, and in a week or two they would be 
 happier and more fit- 
 
 We are told that you cannot deal with our men as 5^ou deal with 
 Russians. Let us ask one of our own fighting men, Commander 
 Locker Lampson, M. P., who is in charge of the British armored car 
 squadrons with the Russian army. When he landed with his men 
 on Russian ground he pointed out that they were now under Prohi- 
 bition, and that in loyalty to our Alh^ they should give up drink. 
 The men agreed. They went through the roughest and coldest 
 weather that any British troops have faced. They were in the 
 White Sea, on the Lapland coast, and with the Cossacks. They 
 touched no alcohol, and they have agreed that when they go out 
 again they will go without drink. It is good to hear of British troops 
 being loyal to our Ally; it would be better still to hear of the British 
 nation standing by her side- 
 
 We are told that it is not fair to rob our men of a drink when 
 they come home. By what law is it fair to lead a man into tempta- 
 tion, unfit him for the service of his country, and weaken him for the 
 hardships he must face? We may let the appeal of Lord Kitchener 
 stand as the answer to this, but we may remember, and never forget, 
 that passage in the report of the Prison Commissioners for 1916, 
 which has these solemn words : 
 
 If one fact stands out more clearly than another as a lesson of the war, 
 it is the magnificent material of which the working-class of this country is 
 composed; and we, who have to deal with what is considered to be the most 
 vicious portion of that class, have no hesitation whatever in endorsing the 
 verdict. When, however, war is succeeded by peace, there will come a time 
 of trial for those who have never turned tl^eir backs to a bodily enemy. 
 With the passing of military discipline our brave fellows will be tempted to 
 forget the miseries of the trenches in a burst of uncontrolled pleasure and 
 license, and, if trade be bad and work difficult to obtain, the transitory lapse 
 may, if not checked, become a step on a downward career. 
 
 We are told that it is not just to punish a nation for a few, and 
 cut ofif drink for those who use it because of those who abuse it. 
 But it is not possible or fair to adopt Prohibition for one class or 
 one sex or one district. Could anything be so mean as Prohibition 
 for our troops while at home we went on drinking? Or as stopping 
 drink for women while men drink all they want? It is not possible. 
 But it is possible, and it is fair, for all to make a common sacrifice to 
 help the nation in its need. 
 
 We are told that it is unjust to deprive investors in the drink 
 trade of their income, or workers of their employment. But there 
 is no need for either. There is work for all, and we can guarantee 
 the incomes as we guaranteed them on the railways. We can turn 
 
 66
 
 FOOLING WITH THE ENEMY 
 
 the whole machinery of the drink trade into more profitable chan- 
 nels by developing industrial alcohol in distilleries and brewing 
 harmless beverages. 
 
 We are told that it is impossble to shut up all the public-houses 
 and leave them standing empty- But there is no need for that. We 
 can shut up whatever places are not fit to live in, and leave the 
 others open for refreshment. 
 
 We are told that whatever is done our hopes will fail ; tt^at the 
 evils we associate with drink will go on the same. But the Board 
 of Control has settled that. We have closed about twenty prisons 
 since the Board began its work; the noisy bands of men who used 
 to roam the streets at night have disappeared; children are better 
 clothed and shod and fed where the Control Board operates; and 
 one Chief Constable reports that living in his town is now "like 
 living in a better world." 
 
 We are told that total abstinence should be voluntary and not 
 compulsory; that if the nation were willing to give 'it up it would 
 have voluntarily followed the King. But voluntaryism has always 
 failed in war; the people do what the Government tells them. They 
 will give up drinking when Parliament does, and when the Govern- 
 ment tells them why. 
 
 We are told that it is not desirable to interfere too much with 
 domestic habits. But we have not hesitated to cut down home sup- 
 plies and take away only sons, or to stop careers and businesses that 
 have been building up for a lifetime- We have had bread at lod. a 
 loaf, milk at 6d. a quart, and potatoes at 2>4d. per pound. The Gov- 
 ernment has not been over-careful to guard us against these things. 
 It could have saved us from much of them all, yet people have not 
 grumbled over-much. The truth is thai every order the Government 
 has given since war began has been accepted and obeyed, and the 
 Prime Minister will tell us that the grumbling during the war has 
 been the trifle of a fraction compared with the grumbling he knew 
 in the budget days of peace. 
 
 We are told that Prohibition is a narrow idea, that nobody 
 wants it but a few cranks. But 2,448 of the most distinguished citi- 
 zens of the United Kingdom have asked for it, and the opinion of the 
 great men of this country and of the world is against alcohol all the 
 time. No nation can be at full strength with such a trade in its 
 midst. If we look round our own country, or round the world, and 
 see the mind of the world's great men about drink, it must fill us 
 with something like despair to realize that at a time like this this 
 trade has still its fingers at our throat. 
 
 67
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 The Prime Minister has declared that this trade has sown destruction 
 and devastation in time of peace, and in war has done us more damage than 
 all the German submarines. 
 
 The King has banished alcohol from his palaces as a traitor to the State. 
 
 General Joffre has declared it the duty of all patriots to fight alcohol in 
 all its forms; by diminishing the moral and material strength of the Army it 
 is« "a crime against national defense in the face of the enemy." 
 
 Lord Kitchener would have nothing to do with drink during the war, 
 and begged his men to keep fit by leaving it alone. 
 
 Lord Roberts, in almost his last message to the nation, declared that 
 drink was prejudicial to our chance of victory. 
 
 Lord Curzon has declared that drink is a leprous spot eating into the 
 life of our people. 
 
 Lord Rosebery warned us long ago of the time that is now come, when, 
 if the State did not control the liquor traffic, the liquor traffic would control 
 the state. 
 
 Mr. Chamberlain, the first of our Imperial statesmen, declared that while 
 a priest-ridden nation was to be pitied, a publican-ridden nation is to be 
 despised. 
 
 Mr. Bonner Law will not touch alcohol, and is believed to be in favor 
 of Prohibition during the war. 
 
 Admiral Jellicoe declares that alcohol is the enemy of efficiency and 
 reduces the efficiency of shooting by one-third. 
 
 Lord Wolseley declared that drink kills more soldiers than all the new 
 weapons of warfare. 
 
 The Tzar of Russia has indicted alcohol as the exploiter of the ruin of 
 his people. 
 
 Admiral Beatty has appealed to the nation to rouse itself from its 
 languor, and it can hardly be possible that the drink trade was not in his 
 mind when he said: "The nation is not yet roused out of its state of self- 
 satisfaction. When our people have humility and prayer in their hearts we 
 can count the days to the end." Nor can it have been out of Sir William 
 Robertson's mind when, on being asked what the Church could do to help 
 to win, he said: "Bishop, make the nation inore religious." 
 
 But there is no end to opinions like these from men whose right to speak 
 for nations 'no one doubts. Let us end the list with the voice of a man 
 who cares nothing for politics and little for religion, but loves a clean and 
 efficient thing. 
 
 Mr. Edison has been looking out upon the war and saying what he 
 thinks; and what he thinks is that the British character is too much given 
 to sport and drink, willing to endure too many cheap clerks and too many 
 beer barons in Parliament. We have made fundamental mistakes; we have 
 stupefied our men with alcohol to keep their wages low and make profit for 
 our titled brewers. We have kept our workers underfed and over-beered. 
 so that they have lost their power to think, with the result that when 
 Germany directed at the ■ Englishman the greatest shock the world has ever 
 known, it looked at first as if she might succeed, because our men had been 
 beered too much for quick patriotic action. Germany had one thing to her 
 credit at least — she had lifted Britain from the slough of sodden drunkenness 
 in which she had been wallowing. 
 
 68
 
 FOOLING WITH THE ENEMY 
 
 It makes a Briton shudder to think that most of what Mr. 
 Edison says is true. 
 
 We are told that Prohibition would not work. It would be as 
 true to say that honesty does not pay. The United States supplies 
 the everlasting answer; she is moving fast in time of peace to that 
 goal to which the European war is driving all the Allies. She is es- 
 tablishing her industries forever and winning for herself the control 
 of the trade of the world by sweeping drink out of her states, forbid- 
 ding it on her railways and her ships and banishing it from her great 
 workshops. Half her people are under Prohibition now, and every 
 election brings in more Prohibition states; but the vital fact that 
 must stir a great emotion in any British heart is this — that Ameri- 
 can industry, with the commercial future almost in its grasp, is 
 being built up on Prohibition. The drink trade in America has noth- 
 ing but contempt for these money-making railway companies and 
 these grasping steel firms. Your brewer, of course, has great ideals. 
 He loves the state and noble things ; but of these great and prosper- 
 ous steel firms, which will not have this drink within their works, 
 we read in the drink papers that "they care for nothing but for their 
 pockets." Of course they care for their pockets, and they know^ that 
 Prohibition lines their pockets with gold. The great Carnegie steel 
 works will not give promotion to any man who drinks, and only want 
 of space keeps out of this book the names of loo great steel firms in 
 the United States that prohibit drink in all their works. If a man 
 drinks at all he may as well not apply for the high wages these firms 
 pay; he is sure to drop out in competition with the rest. 
 
 We are told that not for any reason will the country tolerate 
 Prohibition. But the nation is getting rather used to Prohibitions 
 now. We are to prohibit "whatever saps our strength," and so the 
 Board of Trade will prohibit — fairs ! We have prohibition of white 
 bread, prohibition of light, prohibition of petrol for pleasure, prohi- 
 bition of potatoes for pigs, prohibition of travel, prohibition of trad- 
 ing, of building and postal facilities, prohibition of cakes in theatres 
 and chocolate tied with ribbons, prohibition of anything or every- 
 thing except this thing that stands eternally in the way of Britain 
 and of victory. We are to have beefless days and muttonless days 
 and chickenless days — anything but drinkless days. We are not to 
 spend more than 5s. 6d. on a dinner, but the drink can always be 
 extra; you have it for breakfast and lunch and supper, too, and you 
 can spend as much money on it as you please. Are we children, or 
 are we fools, that Governments should talk to us like this? If we 
 can have all these prohibitions, if the people have sacrificed all these 
 
 69
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 things for their country's sake, what is it that stands in the way of 
 the protection of these islands, the protection of our army and our 
 fleet, the protection of our food supply, from this trade that threatens 
 us and imperils us every hour, that threatens the Allies, that kept 
 munitions from Rumania this year as it kept munitions from Bel- 
 gium last — what is it and who is it that bolsters up this trade that 
 hangs about our necks like a German millstone? 
 
 If we have all this Prohibition of things that strengthen us, 
 why, in the name of heaven and earth and victory, can we not have 
 Prohibition of things that weaken us? 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 THE MOBILIZATION OF ALCOHOL 
 
 For years wise men have pleaded in this country that alcohol 
 should be free for industry — that the tax should be taken ofif so that 
 this wondrous chemical might be used to build up industries and 
 nations instead of destroying them. In peace men cry in vain for 
 these things, but a nation wakes up in war, and the Ministry of Mu- 
 nitions has becorne the greatest distiller of alcohol in the world. For 
 the truth is that this alcohol which sends its stream of weakness 
 through our lands has the very power of victory in it if it is used and 
 not abused. And so the drink trade saves the Empire, we read in 
 its papers ; for is it not making shells — those shells it kept back 
 so long? 
 
 It is a new claim for this trade, and it is startling. It does not 
 tell us much, in its advertisements, of its resistance to restriction, 
 its hostility to the Board of Control, its open flouting of all the 
 rules and regulations by which the Control Board seeks to control 
 it. It is Sir William Peat, at a brewery meeting, who quotes a foul 
 character in Shakespeare to sneer at virtue in these days : "Dost 
 thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes 
 and ale?" As if he should say, "Dost thou think because the state 
 hath need of me I shall give up getting drunk?" We do not hear 
 much from this trade of the repeated requests the Control Board 
 receives from the Ministry of Munitions for the adoption of further 
 restrictions, or of the same sort of requests from the War Office- 
 We do not hear much said about the fact that this trade, grown rich 
 on the poverty of its patrons, pays its workers less than any other 
 trade in this country, and kills its workers faster than any other 
 trade. We do not hear much of that egregious scene in the House 
 
 70
 
 THE MOBILIZATION OF ALCOHOL 
 
 of Commons when a brewer almost wept in public because, by pro- 
 hibiting his exports, the Government was missing a great opportu- 
 nity of popularizing British beer in other countries. This trade that 
 uses up our ships to bring in food to waste would use up ships to 
 send out poisoned food — not, mind you, to our enemies, but to neu- 
 trals and our friends. We are asked by this trade where this 
 country would have been without its great distilleries, ready, as they 
 were, for making high explosives when the country needed them. 
 A representative of the trade has sent round letters to the papers and 
 the burden of them is that with Prohibition before the war we should 
 probably have been beaten at once for want of alcohol, or starved for 
 want of yeast, and "the Empire would have come to an end, with 
 Prussia on the necks of all the nations of the world." Xhe letters 
 are meant presumably for circulation outside Bedlam, but it is a 
 traitor jest. With Prohibition before the war we should have had 
 abundant alcohol for shells, and should have had alive today numbers 
 of men who died for want of shells that drink kept back from them. 
 "Alcohol is much too good to drink," a famous cricketer and naval 
 officer writes to me, "and only a semi-imbecile nation would make 
 a national drink of it." When Prohibition comes we shall do won- 
 ders with alcohol : it will not pull Britain down but will build her up. 
 It will no more ruin her people; it will give them power and great 
 prosperity. It will no more make life a toil and misery for millions ; 
 it will shorten the hours of labor and make life easier. It will no 
 more waste the savings of the poor ; it will make hundreds of things 
 cheaper than they ever were. All these things alcohol will do when 
 we use it rightly. 
 
 God made alcohol: the Church Times says so, and the Church 
 Times ought to know. Let us love the good gifts of God. But let 
 us remember why God made it. He made it to comfort a little 
 child in pain, to soothe the anguish of the world, and whenever we 
 use an anaesthetic to save life and pain let us be thankful that God 
 made alcohol, which gives us chloroform and ether. 
 
 God made alcohol. He made it to give us power, to help those 
 chemists who will yet save the world from slipping back to the Age 
 of Stone. He made it to drive our engines and our motor-cars, to 
 light our homes and towns and cities — as it lights the Philippines, 
 to build up industry with such cheap motive power that a hundred 
 things we buy would be cheaper than they are if we used alcohol 
 for building up instead of pulling down. Yes, God made alcohol. 
 He planted in this world a seed of happiness and prosperity and 
 power. He gave us alcohol to be the sure foundation of our indus- 
 
 71
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 tries and science and our social peace ; and man has made alcohol the 
 thing it is. If ever on this earth there was a tragedy of woe it is 
 this use that man has made of God's good gift. 
 
 God made alcohol : the alcohol trade has been so pleased to find 
 it out that it reprints the Church Time? assurance in thousands and 
 breaks up meetings with it. It does not say, nor does the Church 
 Times say, that God made alcohol to be the friend of Britain and 
 mankind, and not to ruin them. God made the cell that mutinies in 
 the human frame and causes cancer ; God made the germ of cholera 
 and the parasite of venereal disease; but shall v/e therefore spread 
 these things, and sell them in a hundred thousand shops, and plant 
 them in the lives of little children yet unborn? The Church Times 
 does not say. 
 
 We have nobler things to do. We have to take this trade in al- 
 cohol, now the road to ruin, and harness it to industry to be the 
 road to happiness. We have to use it not for feeding public-houses 
 of which we are ashamed, but for feeding power-houses, to be our 
 pride and strength. 
 
 Great days there will be when we grow our power in wide- 
 spreading fields of potatoes ; when we take this produce of the earth 
 and turn it into alcohol for driving engines, making artificial silks 
 and dyes, and developing our chemical industries. Alcohol, cheap 
 and abundant, will be the greatest motive power in Britain. Indis- 
 pensable in munitions of war, it is important in the manufacture of 
 countless articles of use in peace, such as varnishes, polishes, lac- 
 quers, felt and other hats, oilcloths, leather-cloths, celluloid, soap, 
 ether, chloroform, surgical dressings, electric lamp filaments, incan- 
 descent mantles, alkaloids and fine chemicals, hair washes, aniline 
 dyes, photographic plates and papers, and so on. We need not trou- 
 ble much about the patriotism of a trade that has kept back the de- 
 velopment of industrial alcohol, or about its virtuous pretensions 
 because a nation in dire need has ordered it to give up wasting our 
 strength. We may be surprised that any nation in time of war 
 could go on pouring down its throats material for high explosives. 
 In the midst of the famine in shells this need of war was pouring out 
 in ruin and waste from a hundred thousand public-houses, and this 
 trade was filling its bottles and barrels for years that lie ahead. 
 There is, in a Government office, a letter from a firm of high explosive 
 manufacturers begging that the Government would shut up public- 
 houses so that their works could increase their output of explosives. 
 That is to say, the men who were making alcohol into high explo- 
 sives were being made unfit by drinking alcohol. So our distillers 
 
 72
 
 THE ONLY WAY 
 
 turned this priceless chemical against the state. Never must that be 
 possible again. We choose for ourselves whether alcohol shall be 
 our master and defeat us, or our slave and win the war for us. 
 
 Prohibition is not destructive; it is constructive. We should 
 keep busy night and day all our distilleries for making munitions. 
 We should convert all our breweries into manufactories of light 
 beers within the limit of the excise. We should turn our public- 
 houses into houses of refreshment. Nothing is stopped ; nothing is 
 lost; and we could guarantee the dividends until industrial alcohol 
 had come into its own. We should have an alcohol trade on a firm 
 and enduring foundation. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 THE ONLY WAY 
 
 It will not do in these days to say that Prohibition is a mad 
 idea. If we are to win in war, if we are to be great in peace, it is 
 the only way. The arguments against it are mostly on the level of 
 that argument heard in Alberta last year. When the farmers wanted 
 men in other years they could get them from the gaols to save their 
 crops, but with Prohibition the gaols are almost empty, and what 
 then? There are no arguments against Prohibition that are better 
 worth listening to than that. 
 
 Wherever it is tried Prohibition pays. It is nothing to say 
 that a man can get a drink in a Prohibition state. There is no 
 magic in a Prohibition law that saves it from being broken. We 
 have laws against murder, but there are murderers. We have laws 
 against theft, but there are thieves. All laws are broken— mostly 
 thanks to drink. But we have only to want to know the truth to find 
 it out, and the truth about Prohibition is that it is winning every- 
 where. America is coming tc it rapidly. It is her great business 
 men, for the sake of their great industries, who have solved the 
 problem there. The facts of Kansas convince any reasonable man. 
 It has 105 counties, and in 84 there are no paupers, in 35 there are 
 no prisoners, in 87 there are no lunatics. Her banks, barns and bins 
 are full to overflowing. Some counties have had no criminal prose- 
 cutions for ten years or more. The death-rate is the lowest of any 
 nation on the earth. 
 
 Everywhere it is so; with the greatest cause of human misery 
 removed, human life goes well. For long periods and short periods 
 Prohibition pays. It was tried at Liverpool during a strike, and 
 
 1Z
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 brought great blessings in its train. It was tried in a strike in Bris- 
 bane in 1912; and while it lasted the accident ward of the hospital, 
 which had been full for months, was empty. It has been tried in 
 mining camps ; in Denver, Colorado, last year 476 saloons were 
 closed from New Year's Day, and nobody wants them back. It 
 was tried in San Francisco after the earthquake. For ten weeks 
 drink was forbidden there, and in that city of homeless people only 
 six people were arrested in a day. The day that Prohibition ceased 
 there were 74 arrests, and on the third day 113, and extra police and 
 guards had to be called in. It is being tried in Canada now, and 
 railways are doubling their profits_, crime is going down and more 
 food and clothing are being sold. 
 
 Everywhere it is the experience under Prohibition that useful 
 trades prosper exceedingly when drink is stopped. You cannot 
 stop the waste of half a million pounds a day without a good effect 
 all round. The nation that gives up wasting such a mighty sum 
 spends it on useful things. The monc)'- that is not spent on beer and 
 whisky is spent on bread and meat and clothes and travel and edu- 
 cation, and in those places where the drink trade tries to put down 
 Prohibition it is beaten easily by the rally of all the recent trades, 
 which know how drink takes money from their till. 
 
 There are still those who tremble for the revenue if drink should 
 go, but we need not argue with such people, for at last there is be- 
 fore the world the everlasting answer to the question of the revenue. 
 Russia went to war against Japan with vodka on her back ; she 
 saved her revenue and lost her victory. She went to war with Ger- 
 many with alcohol under her feet, and she has saved her revenue 
 and is finding victory too. 
 
 The blood thrills to think of what might be if the courage 
 of Petrograd had been found at Westminster. Russia, in her last 
 full year of peace, drew a revenue of over £90,000,000 from this 
 trade in alcohol, a much greater sum than ours. No statesman be- 
 fore has ever flung away a revenue like that at one bold stroke; 
 socially and financially, it has no parallel. It was said that Russia 
 would be ruined. It was said that her people, used to vodka all 
 their lives, would mutiny against this act of tyranny, or be unable 
 to support their lives without this thing on which they had come to 
 depend. Well, we have the facts of two years before us, and it does 
 not surprise us to know that after two years' experience permanent 
 Prohibition of alcohol is expected to become law in Russia any day. 
 
 In 1912 the people saved in their banks or deposited in securities 
 just over £4,000,000; in 1913 a little less. In the first eight months 
 
 74
 
 THE STRENGTH OF BRITAIN SPEAKS 
 
 of 1914 they took out £ii,oco,ooo mere than they paid in. Then 
 came the war and Prohibition and an almost incredible rise in their 
 saving power. The figures of savings and deposits of securities are 
 hard to believe; let us look at them: 
 
 Last eight months of vodka net loss of £ 11,000,000 
 
 First four months of Prohibition saving of £ 14,000,000 
 
 First full year of Prohibition saving of £ 81,000,000 
 
 First nine months of 1916 saving of £151,000,000 
 
 In two years Russia has recovered her lost revenue and en- 
 riched her people. The bank deposits for the last year of vodka 
 were £8,000,000; the deposits for a year of Prohibition have been 
 £177,000,000. Saved from the revolution that destroys, Russia has 
 passed through the revolution that transforms and invigorates a 
 nation. The recovery of her revenue has been Lhe wonder of finan- 
 cial Europe, and answers forever the lie that civilization cannot 
 pay its way unless founded in drink. Prohibition pays not only in 
 health and strength ; it pays in money, too. 
 
 Of all the wonders of the this age is any greater than this, that 
 Russia and China have revealed to the world the most dramatic man- 
 ifestations of moral power that our times have witnessed. China 
 in peace casts out the vice that held her people in its grip. Russia 
 in peace — for the Tsar had resolved before the war — stops the vice 
 that threatened to destroy her people : even America flings alcohol 
 out of her workshops to strengthen them and make them efficient, 
 and flings out drink from half her states. But Britain? Britain 
 waits, fearing to strike the blow that makes her great indeed. 
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 THE STRENGTH OF BRITAIN SPEAKS 
 
 There awaited Mr. Lloyd George at Downing street, on his re- 
 turn from his first appearance in Parliament as Prime Minister, one 
 of the most remarkable documents that have ever been presented 
 to a British Government. It asked, in the name of 2,448 distin- 
 guished British citizens, that the Government should prohibit the 
 drink trade during the war and put the nation on full strength. 
 After thirty months of war it has come to that. 
 
 It is not too much to say that this document will become his- 
 toric. It stands as a striking expression of the brain-power of the 
 nation. It is not a pronouncement by temperance reformers ; its 
 power, indeed, lies in its great omissions and surprises, for the 
 
 75
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 names we should expect to find are not in the list, and the names 
 we should not look for are here. It is quite clear that those who 
 usually sign such documents have not been asked to sign ; their opin- 
 ion has been taken for granted. The sort of names we find in this 
 great memorial are those of men whose names are household words, 
 or whose place in the nation's life entitles them to speak as having 
 authority. They are men who have been our ambassadors, who 
 have won our battles, commanded our squadrons, built our ships, 
 made our guns, written our books, painted our pictures, carved our 
 monuments, equipped our universities, educated our children, made 
 cur British names illustrious by their discoveries and inventions, ad- 
 ministered justice, built up our industries, maintained our health, 
 presided over our public bodies, shaped our laws in Parliament and 
 advised the King in Privy Council. One of them saved the British 
 army in its retreat from Mons, nine of them wear the V. C. There 
 are nearly loo Admirals and Generals and 150 other army officers. 
 Many of them represent the Red Cross or the rriilitary hospitals ; 
 hundreds are controllers of munitions of war, scientific directors of 
 the science of munitions, or heads of the Ministry of Munitions 
 training schools. A hundred of them represent Parliament, the 
 Privy Council and the imperial services. A hundred more stand for 
 literature, art, music, and the stage, and hundreds represent the 
 great trades and industries and finance. There are 200 baronets and 
 knights, and hundreds of men distinguished in municipal life, in- 
 cluding a hundred who are or have been Mayors, Sheriffs, Deputy 
 Lieutenants of counties and County Council chairmen. There are 
 representatives of every university in the United Kingdom, and the 
 principals of hundreds of university colleges and public schools. 
 There are 60 or 70 Fellows of the Royal Society and 25 members or 
 associates of the Royal Academy. There are 500 magistrates and 
 about the same number of doctors, including medical officers of 
 health for nearly one-third of the United Kingdom. 
 
 But even such a summary as this can hardly give a proper con- 
 ception of the dignity of this list of names. It stands for the in- 
 tellectual and industrial strength of Britain. At the head of its 
 
 • • • 1 1 
 
 military group stands a General on active service who wears the 
 
 Victoria Cross, another who wears the D. S. O., another whose 
 name has rung through Europe in this war. At the head of its 
 munitions group is the present Controller of Shipping, with the chair- 
 man of the Cunard Line, all the great shipbuilders, and such a man 
 as the late Sir Hiram Maxium. At the head of the imperial group 
 stands Viscount Bryce, our late Ambassador in the great Republic of
 
 THE STRENGTH OF BRITAIN SPEAKS 
 
 the West, with Sir Ernest Satow, our late Ambassador to our gal- 
 lant Ally in the East. The Order of Merit which Viscount Bryce 
 represents is found at the head of other groups as well, as the Vic- 
 toria Cross heads the list of soldiers, so the Order of Merit heads 
 the list of public servants, of authors and of scientists. At the 
 head of the literature group stands Thomas Hardy, with the Poet 
 Laureate beside him ; at the head of the group of science men stands 
 Sir William Crookes, with such names following as Sir E. Ray 
 Lankester, Sir Norman l^ockyer and Sir Ernest Rutherford. 
 
 For education we have Dr. Michael Sadler, with the Master of 
 Balliol, the Provost of Oriel, and hundreds of names familiar in 
 learning; and when we come to medicine and the public health, we 
 find Sir Rickman Godlee, president of the Royal College of Surgeons, 
 with such men as Sir William Osier and Sir Edward Schafer and 
 most of our great physiologists and surgeoris. There are men here 
 like Sir Patrick Manson and Sir Ronald Ross, whose work has saved 
 millions of lives throughout the world. 
 
 And there are not men* only, there are women and organizations, 
 too. There is a daughter of Lord Lansdowne and a daughter of 
 Mr. Gladstone; a sister of Lord Kitchener and a sister of Lord 
 French; there is the wife of the late president of the Board of Trade 
 and the wife of the present Prime Minister — a curious thing it is 
 that, waiting for Mr. Lloyd George as he came home on his first 
 great day as Premier, w^as this appeal from his wife, in company 
 with thousands of the most distinguished people in the nation, plead- 
 ing that Britain might be put in full strength There are all the 
 great leaders of the great Y. M. C. A., the heads of the Salvation 
 Army and the Church Army, and men and women who stand for 
 social work in our great towns. And there are men and women who 
 stand for the will of the masses of the people — such names we find 
 as Mrs. Snowden, Mrs. Sidney Webb. Mr. George Lansburg, Mr. 
 Thomas Burt, M. P.. Mr. Richards. M. P., the Secretary of the 
 Miners' Federation, such miners' M. P.'s as Mr. J. G. Hancock, Mr. 
 Finney and Mr. Galbraith. Though the memorial stands chiefly out- 
 side Parliament, the M. P.'s on this list represent about five millions 
 of the population, and several of them are members of the Gov- 
 ernment. 
 
 No charge of narrow fanaticism can be brought against a doc- 
 ument like this. It speaks for the brain-power of the British peo- 
 ple, and it asks for immediate and total Prohibition of the liquor 
 trade as long as the war lasts. Except for the drink trade organs 
 and the Church Times, which accused it of deliberate falsehood and 
 
 V
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 refused to publish the reply sent to it on behalf of these 2,448 people, 
 even though the memorialists offered to pay for their reply as an 
 advertisement, no attempt has been made to belittle this grave ap- 
 peal. It is true that the lead of the Church Times was widely taken 
 up by the trade, which reprinted that paper's outrade and broke up 
 meeting with the aid of it; and it is true that at the Medway 
 Board of Guardians, on which the drink trade is well represented, 
 the chairman, Mr. E. A. Billinghurst, thought it not beneath his 
 dignity to declare that he knew of men in the list who had never 
 signed at all, though neither private nor public appeals have pre- 
 vailed upon this chairman to disclose these names. The statement 
 is obviously untrue, but the Medway Board of Gurdians, with a 
 more than adequate leaven of tlje trade that prolongs the war, has 
 no time to bother over much whether the things that are said at 
 its meetings are false or true. It contemplates a new Boys' Home, 
 and we may hope that it will teach the boys the love of truth and 
 impress them with a sense of honor, and perhaps remember, also, 
 in these days, the sacredness of an Englishman's word. 
 
 What is it that this great document says? Here it is. It 
 should be remembered that some of its figures belong to the date 
 when the Memorial was drawn up, in June, 1916. Others are here 
 brought up to date : 
 
 We, Citizens of the United Kingdom, appeal to the Government to put 
 the nation on its full strength. 
 
 Two grave dangers stand before us, holding back the power of early- 
 victory and throwing a shadow over the vision of peace. One is the wasting 
 power of alcohol; the other is the imperiling of infant life. Among all the 
 factors of weakness, these confront us with terrible vividness, and they lie 
 within our own control. With the weakening power of alcohol removed, our 
 national effort against th-e enemy would have gathered increased strength; 
 with increased strength and more rapid supplies our losses in six campaigns 
 would have been substantially reduced. 
 
 Now that the nation has followed the example of our Allies in enrolling 
 its full manhood, we appeal that we may range ourselves with our greatest 
 Allies and put on the whole armor of Britain. The power exerted by alcohol 
 cuts through the efficiency of the nation; it weakens our fighting forces and 
 must lengthen the war. These facts stand out concerning this powerful 
 trade. 
 
 It hinders the Army; it is the cause of grave delay with munitions; it 
 keeps thousands of men from war work every day, and makes good sober 
 workmen second-rate. 
 
 It hampers the Navy; it delays transports, places them at the mercy of 
 submarines, slows down repairs, and congests the docks. 
 
 It threatens our mercantile marine; it has absorbed during the war over 
 two hundred million cubic feet of space, and it retards the building of ships 
 to replace our losses. 
 
 78
 
 THE STRENGTH OF BRITAIN SPEAKS 
 
 It destroys our food supplies; since the war began it has consumed over 
 3,500,000 tons of food, with sugar enough to last the nation 100 days. It 
 uses up more sugar than the Arniy. 
 
 It wastes our financial strength; since the war began, our people have 
 spent on alcohol over 400,000,000 pounds. 
 
 It diverts the nation's strength; it uses 500,000 workers, 1,000,000 acres 
 
 of land, and 1,500,000 tons of coal a year; and diaring the war it has involved 
 
 the lifting and handling on road and rail of a weight equal to 50,000,000 tons. 
 
 It shatters our moral strength; its temptations to women involve grave 
 
 danger to children and anxiety to thousands of soldiers. 
 
 The serious facts concerning the effects of drink on our forces have 
 been known since the early days of the war, and military and naval officials 
 appointed to investigate them pressed strongly for instant decision. During 
 the eighteen months since then the Government appointed the Board of 
 Control, but its work, successful socially, has had little effect in the great 
 industries on which our armies rely. Here the terrible truth of eighteen, 
 months ago is still terribly true; the men in the trenches are betrayed by 
 an enemy at home. After all that has been done the loss of time on the 
 Clyde is reduced from 20 to lOj/^ per cent; men earning a good week's wage 
 in half a week abandon work for drinking, and those men who give their best 
 to the nation, striving nobly to undo the injury of their weaker comrades, 
 are powerless in this cruel grip. It is not drunkenness alone, however, but 
 the constant sapping of men's energies by alcohol that endangers our sup- 
 plies of munitions. Nearly two years have passed since the King banished 
 this source of natiohal weakness from his household; since engineers, manu- 
 facturers of explosives, admirals, directors of naval equipment, urged the 
 Government to banish it from the nation; since the Director of Transports 
 appealed for the withdrawal of all drink licenses for the sake of the Army 
 and Navy; and since the Shipbuilders' Federation declared that "with the 
 total abolition of drink the work would go with a swing and you would get 
 as fine work in our yards and shops as in the trenches." Yet the alcohol 
 brake is still on our workshops. 
 
 As it is impossible to estimate the disastrous naval, military, social and 
 economic consequences of alcohol in this crisis, so it is impossible to exag- 
 gerate the good results of its removal. In towns under the Control Board 
 Chiefs of Police are glowing in their praise of peaceful towns, and quiet 
 streets at night, the London Sessions following the adoption of the Order 
 were the shortest ever known, and several prisons have been closed since 
 the Board began its work. Yet, though the general drinking hours have 
 been suddenly cut down to two short periods a day, there has been no 
 serious complaint, and we commend this as proof of the readiness of the 
 people to accept war restrictions and to share in a common sacrifice. 
 
 We are convinced that the dangers confronting us arise from the sudden 
 possession of abundant wages rather than from a lack of patriotic feeling 
 untrained in spending or in thrift, large numbers of our workers waste their 
 reserves in drink. The greatest good a Government can render to its 
 temptations, and there lies upon us now the double duty of protecting our 
 people from the temptation to drink away their earnings, and of protecting 
 the State from the intolerable folly of high war wages turned to the advan- 
 tage of our enemies. 
 
 With the resources of the nation taxed to their utmost, the waste of 
 £500,000 a day on alcohol is a fact of pitiful significance.* With their high 
 
 79
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 wages our people dig ruts of sorrow instead of building up reserves oi 
 power and independence; children die faster of neglect, and a City Missionary 
 had received forty appeals from the trenches to look alter wives "going 
 wrong" through drink. 
 
 It is said we need the revenue the State derives from alcohol, the 
 answer lies in these things. No nation can make a profit from such a trade 
 as this. But the fear for the revenue is shattered by the noble action of our 
 Allies and Dominions; of Russia, which has prohibited vodka; of France, 
 which had prohibited absinthe and the sale of spirits to women, soldiers and 
 young people; and of parts of our Dominions, especially in Canada, where 
 the sale of alcohol is rapidly disappearing, followed by the closing of prisons 
 and the quickening-up of life. 
 
 Russia, wanting strength and money too, has found both in Prohibition. 
 The saving power of her people has arisen from shillings to pounds. The 
 banks that received £180,000 in January before the war, received in January, 
 1915, £5,600,000 and in January, 1916, £12,000,000. The industrial efficiency 
 of Russia has increased by 30 per cent, and an increase of 10 per cent in 
 our efficiency would replace our revenue from drink. 
 
 But against all considerations of financial sacrifice must be set the 
 threatened loss of our mercantile supremacy at sea. Unless we can replace 
 our lost ships our supremacy is doomed, and victory in the field must find 
 us bereft of the chief factor of our national prosperity. The cargoes carried 
 for the drink trade by our war-time ships have eben about 2,000,000 tons, 
 and the same cause that reduces our shipping reduces, our capacity for re- 
 pairing and replacing our lost carrying power at sea. The contemplation 
 of these things while neutral nations are building fleets inust give rise to 
 the gravest apprehension. 
 
 More serious still is the peril of the child-life of the State. It is perishing 
 faster than in times of peace. Our brave ally, France, with the enemy almost 
 at the gates of Paris, won for itself the enduring distinction of the lowest 
 infant death-rate ever recorded in its capital. What Paris can do can be 
 done in our own towns, if the same patriotic devotion be shown by our own 
 people, and if all removable dangers to child-life be removed. Chief among 
 these dangers is alcohol. 
 
 No source of weakness under our control is so widespread; none is 
 more vital to the safety of the State in war and its welfare in peace. But 
 the dangers of alcohol are tenfold now. The prevalence of venereal disease 
 among one-tenth of our urban population, its special danger to child-life, 
 and the anxiety gifts of peace, impose upon us an increasing responsibility. 
 In 1912, over 270,000 working days were lost in the Navy from this cause, 
 and 216,000 days in the Army; and the Royal Commission has urged that 
 a decrease of drinking would be an important factor in the decrease of this 
 far-reaching cause of national decay. 
 
 It is not to be questioned that in all these causes for apprehension 
 alcohol is the greatest single factor that can be controlled. It is not to be 
 questioned that the nation has readily approved the half-way step to Pro- 
 hibition that has already been taken. It is our profound conviction that the 
 next step must be taken before the strength of Britain can be thrown effect- 
 ively into the arena on which our liberties depend. No nation can be at full 
 strength with such a factor in its midst. 
 
 We are no temperance reformers as such. We stand for the great desire 
 of all good people to strike the mightiest blow for freedom of which Britain 
 
 80
 
 WHAT IS TO BE DONE? 
 
 is capable. We support the demand for Prohibition made to the Government 
 by its own investigators, and by tiie Shipbuilders' deputation, with not a 
 teetotaler among them. In March, 1915, believing, in the Prime Minister's 
 words, that "No sacrifice is too great when freedom and honor are at stake," 
 and that rich and poor alike should bear it, we ask the Government to with- 
 draw all drink licenses throughout the Kingdom for the period of the war. 
 
 We believe a golden moment has arrived for our country; that prepared 
 for sacrifice by the example of the King and Lord Kitchener, the nation is 
 ready for the natural step that France and Russia have already taken. The 
 suspension of the liquor traffic during the war, the conversion of the public- 
 houses into houses of refreshment, will quicken up our civil and fighting 
 population, will raise a new fire resolution in our people, and will give to 
 millions the first opportunity they have ever had of breaking old habits of 
 weakness and forming new habits of strength. 
 
 We believe that in this, as in all other vital issues, there must be sym- 
 pathy of purpose and in unity of action, between the Allied Nations, and we 
 appeal to the Government to be bold and trust our people to be strong and 
 follow our Allies, to be worthy of the mighty destinies they hold in solemn 
 trust. 
 
 It stands on the record forever that in this time of national 
 danger it was necessary, in the opinion of the industrial and intel- 
 lectual leaders of this land, to stop the drink trade to preserve our 
 h'berties ; and it stands on record that this bitter peril still exists 
 in Britain after thirty months of war. 
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 WHAT IS TO BE DONE? 
 
 It is difficult to come to any other conclusion but one after 
 reading all the facts in this book. If there is one thing about which 
 there is general agreement and steadily growing conviction, it is this 
 drink curse. On every hand it is acknowledged to be our greatest 
 enemy. Quite apart from the appalling fact that for years it has 
 fastened its shackles upon our national life, destroying the bodies 
 and souls of countless men and women, and creating untold misery, 
 poverty and tragedy — which in our easy difference we have come 
 to accept as a matter of course, and to look upon without a shud- 
 der — it is now being brought home to us in convincing fashion that 
 ultimate victory in the war and the firm handling of this foe in our 
 midst are very closely related. 
 
 Nearly two years ago the nation was solemnly warned by the 
 present Prime Minister that of all the enemies arrayed against us 
 in the tremendous struggle of these days, the most powerful and 
 threatening is drink. At that time it almost seemed as though the 
 hour of deliverance has at last come and that Great Britain was 
 
 81
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 about to assert her latent moral strength and put an end to the 
 whole evil business. And had the Government then but taken the 
 straight and courageous course, it is certain that its action would 
 have been backed — whatever it had cost — by all that part of the 
 nation which really counts. But it failed. Once again the brewer 
 and distiller proclaimed who are the real rulers of our land. Their 
 defiant challenge, like the crack of a slave-driver's whip, brought 
 both political parties to heel. The British Parliament, said Mr. 
 Lloyd George, quailed before an enraged crowd of Irish distillers 
 and publicans. Britain might be worsted in her great task on the 
 fields of France and on the high seas. The bodies and souls of 
 men, women and children might be destroyed at home. Every ef- 
 ficiency might be impaired, and every evil thing that flourishes un- 
 der the shadow of the public-house might multiply. But what of 
 that in comparison with the vested interests of this trade? 
 
 With splendid heroism, which it would be impertinence to praise, 
 our soldiers have fought against terrible odds. Their deeds will 
 live as long as the Empire lasts. The red tinge of their sacrifice will 
 sanctify all our future liberties. But what have we done for them 
 in guarding their homes from the invasion of the destroyer? What 
 have we done to make our land clean and sober and in some degree 
 worthy of their blood? We have tinkered away at Boards of Con- 
 trol and shortened hours for drinking facilities— rtrying to cure a 
 cancer with court-plaster! We have given the greatest of our ene- 
 mies a new lease of life in our midst. We have flouted the first 
 claim of that righteousness by which alone a people is exalted. 
 
 Is it to be wondered at if our Allies express some lack of con- 
 fidence in us? Russia gave us a magnificent lead, and France has 
 followed her ; while our successive Governments, despite earnest 
 representation from those who are in closest touch with the great 
 centers of population and industry, have so far been content to let 
 things go as they are, and Great Britain has thus been made to ap- 
 pear as though she gloried in her shame. It is not too much to say 
 that the whole world looks on and wonders. At the present time 
 the most widely read organs of the press in Japan are publishing 
 articles on the decadence of Great Britain, pointing to the drink evil 
 and our unwillingness or powerlessness to deal with it, as the great- 
 est cause of deterioration of our peoples and the plainest sign of our 
 effeteness. Nor do they fail to draw the inevitable corollary that 
 Japanese interests in the future will be best served by seeking al- 
 liance with nations more .like herself in moral vigor. The influen- 
 tial native press of China is full of the same kind of thing, contrast- 
 
 82
 
 WHAT IS TO BE DONE? 
 
 ing, as it has a perfect right to do, the Chinese self-liberation from 
 the thraldom of the opium curse with our feebleness in regard to 
 alcohol. This is the humiliating position we have been brought to 
 under the rule of the trade, with its sardonic grin at every sugges- 
 tion of a freed land, and its tight grip upon the chief political parties 
 in our state, secured by the power of blood-money. Who can ex- 
 press the shame of it, that Great Britain, once the saviour of weak 
 peoples, should have become a spectacle for their scorn? 
 
 Of course, we are not unmindful of the cost Prohibition in- 
 volves, nor do we suggest any harsh or unjust treatment ©f those 
 involved by the arbitrary extinction of licenses to produce and seal 
 the stuff without regard to the claims of honesty. But we do say 
 that whatever the cost this thing has to be done, and that we must 
 summon every moral reserve to carry through the sacrifice. An 
 initial sum of £300,000,000 has been named as the minimum price 
 at which the state could secure control of the liquor trade as the 
 first step toward bringing it to an end. 
 
 Well, what of it? At most it is only two months' cost of the 
 war; it would be recovered many times over in the amount saved 
 by the shortening of the struggle, for the impetus and speeding-up 
 which would follow would go a long way toward carrying us to 
 triumph. But let it be clearly understood that for the state merely 
 to acquire and carry on this business is by no means an answer to 
 the demand of the hour. It may be a means to an end, but it is 
 not in itself the end. Drink is drink, with all its hellish brood in 
 its train, whether it be dispensed by a Government department or 
 by private enterprise. It cannot be mended by a mere change of 
 ownership. It must be ended at the will of an united people. 
 
 As to the old objection regarding loss of revenue, it is difficult 
 to see any cogency in its appeal. We only know that at present we 
 are literally wasting the vast amount which goes into the hungry 
 maw of this trade. It is utterly unproductive, except in a vicious 
 circle, and might as well be thrown into the sea — far better, indeed, 
 for then the moral consequences of its conversion into drink would 
 not defile or destroy our nation. On the lowest ground at all, it is 
 rot sound finance to raise revenue at such unspeakable cost of human 
 life, which is the real capital of any country. Are we going to let 
 the old sophistries of politicians about revenue stand any longer 
 in the way of emancipation? Are we going to confess ourselves de- 
 feated once again? Or are we going to pse in our strength and put 
 an end to this thing? 
 
 Who. indeed, can be satisfied at the condition of degrading 
 
 83
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 bondage in which we live? Looked at from any point of view, so- 
 cial, economic, productive or military — the retention of the brewer 
 and distiller as the traitorous dictators of our destinies is an appal- 
 ling piece of blindness. When, as we have seen it, political control 
 is divorced from moral purpose, and things essential are sacrificed 
 to things expedient. Nemesis must sooner or later overtake the 
 guilty. Ultimately every house built on the sand is tested by the 
 flood and swept away. Were it not so, it would be hard to believe 
 in any Divine control of human affairs. Are we content to be- 
 lieve that Britain's national mission is at an end? The only alter- 
 native is that she should set her house in order and make herself 
 morally worthy of the service of the God of nations. 
 
 Above and beyond all other considerations which have been 
 advanced in these pages is the moral one. The present time, with 
 its heavy demands and searching anxieties, has robbed us of many 
 illusions. It has torn aside the disguises of ordinary days from men 
 and nations alike, and has brought to light naked crudities both of 
 belief and behavior. We have always prided ourselves on being a 
 Christian nation, but we have been revealed as being swayed and 
 governed by motives and inspirations that cannot in any sense be 
 called Christian. We all recognize gratefully how goodly is our 
 heritage. In our national life there is much, very much, for which 
 to be thankful and proud. Britain's innate love of justice and fair 
 play ; the purity of our public life ; the disinterestedness of state and 
 civic administrations ; the increasingly humane treatment of the 
 poor, the imbecile and the prisoner; the benefit of education placed 
 vv'ithin reach of all ; the protection of the toiling classes against the 
 rapacity of those who would exploit them for gain ; the applicatioB 
 of scientific law and invention to the well-being of the people ; the 
 fidelity to pledged word in international affairs — all these give us 
 cause for thanksgiving and pride. 
 
 But let us face this grave question seriously. Do these things 
 really make a nation Christian? Unconsciously influenced to an 
 extent by something of the spirit and teaching of Christianity which 
 has filtered through into the life and thinking of a great mass of the 
 people, much of our legislation and several of our war institutions 
 undoubtedly are; but does this mark us out as a Christian nation? 
 Surely a nation which is at heart Christian must give infinitely 
 higher moral expression to its life than any of these things. The 
 war has brought to light a good deal of latent Christian sentiment 
 in the nation. Never was there such an exhibition of generosity, 
 self-sacrifice and willingness to serve as now. Never have men 
 
 84
 
 WHAT IS TO BE DONE? 
 
 been so ready to sink themselves for the good of others. Never has 
 Britain been so near to the Kingdom of God as now. By one su- 
 preme act of courageous sacrifice she may win her soul. But will 
 she awaken to know the day of her visitation? 
 
 It is more than doubtful if organized religion is going to prove 
 her helper. Whether the churches can divest themselves of bonds 
 and grave-clothes, and in new-found freedom lay hold of this solemn 
 opportunity of directing the national sentiment toward Christ's rule, 
 and of leading the national energy to His obedience, remains to be 
 seen. At present it must be confessed the signs are not hopeful ; 
 but meanwhile our immediate duty is clear. Each one must trans- 
 late his faith into works. In the discharge of our duty as citizens 
 and soldiers we must seek first the Kingdom of God and His right- 
 eousness. We must dedicate our own energy to the stupendous 
 task of bringing the life of our nation under the recreating rule of 
 God. In view of the present situation it is clear that we shall fail 
 in our first responsibility if we are content to do anything less than 
 give ourselves heart and soul to this war of liberation. 
 
 We have talked long about the necessity of national repentance 
 and amendment. Surely the time has come for resolute personal 
 action. Here is our task to hand, and our opportunity of following 
 the lead of Him who did not hesitate to use a vv'hip of small cords 
 when the rights of God and men were invaded. The nation gen- 
 erally has refused to follow the lead of the King in banishing drink. 
 Will that true Church of Christ, which has its members within every 
 religious body, and outside of them all, refuse likewise to follow Him? 
 Or, bearing "the sword bathed with Heaven," will it unite to spend 
 its very strength in this battle for a liberated land? 
 
 Away with indifference and apathy! Away with political and 
 ecclesiastical insincerities ! Away with the idea of an apathetic God, 
 acquiescent in a nation losing its soul, caring only to snatch a few 
 from ultimate disaster! Away with the paralyzing cant of an up- 
 lifted voice and a down-hanging arm: Away with the worthless 
 prayer of a people which calls on Heaven for victory against an 
 outer foe and regards this profitable iniquity in its heart ! 
 
 There is no question as to what the right course is. Humiliat- 
 ing though it is to confess, our Allies have shown us the way and 
 our colonies have driven home the lesson of their example. Even 
 though the bugles of peace should sound tomorrow, declaring the 
 horrors of bloodshed at an end, and every objective for which we 
 have drawn the sword achieved, Britain would stand before God and 
 
 85
 
 DEFEAT? 
 
 the world a defeated nation if this evil is not trampled under foot. 
 Her last state would be worse than her first. The battle is joined. 
 The issue is plain. Each one of us shares the responsibility of vic- 
 tory or defeat. 
 
 There is a scene in an old book which may well help us each 
 to make resolve and to take our part worthily: 
 
 Then the Interpreter took him, and led him up toward the door of the 
 palace; and behold, at the door stood a great company of men, as desirous 
 to go in but durst not. There also sat a man at a little distance from the 
 door, at a table, with a Book and his Inkhorn before him, to take the name 
 of him that should enter therein. He saw also that in the doorway stood 
 many men in armor to keep it, being resolved to do the men that would 
 enter what hurt and mischief they could. 
 
 Now was Christian somewhat in a muse. At last, when every man 
 started back for fear of the armed men, Christian saw a Man of a very stout 
 countenance come up to the man that sat there to write, saying: "Set down 
 my name. Sir." The which when he had done, he saw the Man draw his 
 sword, and put an helmet upon his head, and rush toward the door upon the 
 armed men, who laid upon him with deadly force. But the Man, not at all 
 discouraged, fell to cutting and hacking most fiercely. So after he had 
 received and given many wounds to those who attempted to keep him out. 
 he cut his way through them all, and pressed forward into the Palace. At 
 which there was a pleasant voice from those within, even of those that 
 walked upon the top of the Palace, saying: 
 
 Come in, come: 
 Eternal glory thou shalt win. 
 
 So he went in, and was clothed with such garments as they. Then 
 Christian smiled and said: 
 
 I think verily I know the meaning of this. 
 
 86
 
 The Stern Facts 
 
 WITH THEIR OFFICIAL AND SCIENTIFIC PROOF 
 TRUTH ABOUT THE FOOD CRISIS 
 
 We have come to the greatest crisis ever known in the Food 
 Supply of Britain. These are the stern facts about it. 
 
 The value of food in producing bodily energy is measured in 
 Calories, a Calorie being the unit of heat. We need for the United 
 Kingdom about 1,000.000 Calories per head per year — 46,000,000,- 
 000,000 (46 million million) in these days let us say we can sustain 
 our strength on 42,000,000,000,000. 
 
 The Calorie value of the food destroyed by the Drink Trade 
 during the war (August 1914, to January 1917 inclusive), making 
 the maximum possible allowances for values returned, and dis- 
 counting alcohol used for munitions, is equal to at least 11,000,000,- 
 000,000 Calories. ' 
 
 Taking only the ration scale fixed by the Food Controller in 
 February 1917, this is equal to the provision of such rations for 165 
 days, or it is equal to the destruction of the normal food supply of 
 the whole nation for 88 days. 
 
 The Drink Trade has destroyed during the war food to last the 
 entire nation three months, and to have sustained the whole British 
 Army from the beginning of the war till now. 
 At the beginning of the war this 
 
 trade destroyed the nation's food 48 days a year. 
 
 At present (February 1917) this 
 
 trade is destroying our food 30 days a year 
 
 After All Fools' Day its destruc- 
 tion of food is to be 20 days a year 
 
 That is to say, we have cut down our Fools' Days from four a 
 month to not quite two ; we are to have 20 Fools' Days in a year 
 instead of 48. But why should we be fools at all? 
 
 THE WASTE OF FOOD IN A YEAR'S BEER 
 
 A scientific investigation of this destruction of food has been made for 
 this book. It deals with a year's output of beer, the beverage concerning 
 which anonymous advertisers are spending thousands of pounds to delude 
 the nation into believing that it is a food. No man dare put his name to 
 those advertisements; they are lies, as every scientist knows. This is the 
 truth about a year's supply of beer. In all these figures a billion means one 
 million million. 
 
 A year's beer in peace time is 36,000,000 barrels, and uses up 
 1,550,000 tons of grain and sugar, containing 5,500.000.000,000 
 Calories. This is about 23 per cent of the 24 billion Calories now 
 included in the rations allowed the United Kingdom by the Food 
 Controller. 87
 
 THE STERN FACTS 
 
 What does the brewer make of these things? We will put 
 aside the grave objections to feeding cows on brewers' grains, and 
 give the brewer full value for his share in the milk. Taking the 
 beer and the milk together, giving no food value to the alcohol but 
 half value to the nitrogen in the beer, as some contend we should, 
 the total value of the brewer's products stand at 1,500,000,000,000 
 Calories. The brewer took 5,500,000,000,000 Calories and has lost 
 4,000,000,000,000; he has destroyed 70 per cent of the food he took. 
 
 THE UNNECESSARY BY-PRODUCTS OF THE BREWER 
 
 It is not true that the nation needs the by-products of brewing. 
 We can do without the brewers' yeast, his grains are dangerous for 
 cows' milk, and whether as meat or milk, a very small percentage 
 of their food-value returns to man. The brewing trade is utterly 
 unnecessary for any by-products it yields. 
 
 WHAT THE NATION LOSES ON BREWERS' BARLEY 
 
 We lose enormously by growing barley when we might grow 
 wheat. The brewers say that 40 per cent of the barley cannot be 
 used as human food, and that if barley is used for pigs its efiBciency 
 is only 15 per cent. That is true. But if we grow or import wheat 
 for human food instead of barley for beer, only 20 per cent need be 
 used for pigs instead of 40 per cent, and the human food value in 
 flour, milk, meat, and sugar will be 4,500,000,000,000 Calories instead 
 of 1,500,000,000,000. We therefore lose 3,000,000,000,000 Calories 
 on our barley-for-beer account, or food for the whole of the United 
 Kingdom for 26 days. 
 
 WILL MR. PROTHERO THROW AWAY 12 DAYS' BREAD 
 
 FOR THE ARMY? 
 
 Over 30,000 acres of the best soil in England are at this moment 
 in peril of being devoted to hops, a narcotic drug, instead of bread. 
 Mr. Prothero, the Minister of Agriculture who describes England 
 as a beleaguered city, encourages the farmers to grow hops, as the 
 hopfields could grow only "one and a half day's bread for the people." 
 
 Then are we to throw away one and a-half days' bread for the 
 whole United Kingdom? It is twelve days' bread for the 
 army, and to grow it instead of importing it would save millions 
 of cubic feet of shipping, thousands of tons of coal, and the man- 
 power of carrying heat thousands of miles. 
 
 GRAVE DANGER OF WASTING OUR FOOD MARGIN 
 
 Official 
 
 The following is an Extract from the Report of the Scientific Committee 
 appointed by the Board of Trade to inquire into the strength of Britain. 
 
 88
 
 THE STERN FACTS 
 
 The Chairman (Professor Waller) and the two other physiologists on this 
 Committee have all signed the Strength of Britain Memorial. 
 
 "Up to the present the supply of food has provided a general 
 margin of about 5 per cent above the minimum necessary for proper 
 nutrition, and rather more as regards the supply of energy, so that a 
 reduction to this extent could be borne without serious injury to 
 the community, but only on the condition that steps were taken to 
 ensure the equitable distribution of the available food throughout 
 the population. ... It is important to remember that slight 
 reduction of food below the necessary amount causes a large dimi- 
 nution in the working efficiency of the individual." 
 
 WHY BREWERS' GRAINS MAKE MILK DANGEROUS 
 
 It is not safe to feed babies on milk produced from brewers' 
 grains, and it is a thousand pities Mr. Prothero did not know this in 
 time to save him from a statement that endangers child-life. Brew- 
 ers' grains produce functional disturbances and disease in the cow, 
 and milk from such cows is not safe for infants. Brewers' grains are 
 not allowed to be used for the cows that yield milk and butter for 
 Copenhagen, the capital of the country that leads the world in dairy- 
 farming. More than half the population of the earth lives without 
 them. 
 
 BREWERS^ YEAST IS NOT NEEDED FOR BAKING 
 
 The brewers say their yeast is essential for bread, but they 
 omit this from the advertisements in their own trade organ, which 
 knows the facts. Brewers' yeast is poor and second best, and the 
 best bakers will not use it. We can get all the yeast a nation wants 
 without beer. 
 
 In the Journal of the Board of Agriculture Professor Crowther, 
 Professor of Agriculture in Leeds University, writes: 
 
 At one time the surplus yeast of the brewery was largely utilized in the 
 baking of bread, but in the last few decades, with the rise of the compressed 
 yeast industry supplying a superior product for baking purposes, and with 
 changes in brewing leading in many cases to the production of yeast of 
 inferior value for baking purposes, this outlet for the brewers' surplus yeast 
 has steadily diminished. Various attempts have been made to turn out from 
 the brewery a yeast equal for baking to compressed yeast, but without ap- 
 preciable success. 
 
 BEER, WINE, AND SPIRITS ARE NOT FOOD— Official 
 
 The Board of Education, in its Official Syllabus, says: 
 Beer, Wine, and Spirits — these things are not of real use to us 
 because they cannot make us grow, nor keep the body from wear- 
 ing away, and they cannot make us strong or warm. . . . They 
 are unable to help to nourish the body. 
 
 89
 
 THE STERN FACTS 
 
 HOW DRINK PUTS UP FOOD PRICES— Official 
 
 Immense quantities of food materials, such as barley, wheat, and 
 maize, are used in this country for the manufacture of beer and 
 spirits. As beer and spirits are almost valueless as food, and can 
 only be classed as luxuries pure and simple, all this grain is lost for 
 food purposes. If this grain were available for food for both man 
 and beast, the prices of bread and meat would be lowered. — War 
 Savings Committee. 
 
 THERE IS NO WASTE SUGAR IN NON-ALCOHOLIC 
 
 DRINKS 
 All sugar used in making alcohol is destroyed in that act, but all 
 sugar used in non-alcoholic drinks is retained in the beverage and 
 supplies energy to the heart and other muscles. 
 
 CENSUS OF MAN-POWER USED BY DRINK— Official 
 
 According to the Census of Production in 1907, the Drink 
 
 Trade takes £20,000,000 worth of material and fuel and turns it into 
 
 £45,000,000 worth of beer and £1,096,000 worth of forage for cattle. 
 
 It uses 85,000 people for turning £20,000,000 worth of good food for 
 
 man or beast into £1,000,000 of poor food for cattle plus — beer. 
 
 According to the last census of the population, about 465.000 
 persons are employed by the licensed trade in the United Kingdom, 
 of whom in England and Wales at least 191,000 were men under 
 45 and 68,000 were women under 35. 
 
 SOLEMN WORDS ON DEMOBILIZATION— By a Judge 
 
 Mr. Justice Rowlatt, in the case of a wounded soldier charged with 
 burglary at Derby Assizes, the defense being that he was .drunk, said: 
 
 We must look forward almost with terror to the time when 
 hundreds of thousands of brave men would be returning from the 
 Front and would be exposed to the temptations to which this prisoner 
 was exposed. It might be that a clean sweep would have to be 
 made of the liquor trade if the country was not to be deluged with 
 charges such as this. The law must make it clear that those who 
 had served abroad must also serve at home with respect for the 
 laws of society. If not, society must dissolve. 
 
 CENSUS OF SHIPPING USED BY DRINK— Official 
 
 The whole weight of grain and sugar used in brewing and dis- 
 tilling may be regarded as a drain on the tonnage space available 
 for foodstuffs, said Mr. Pretyman in the House of Commons on 
 November 28, 1916. The space used up by the trade in the year 
 ended September 30, 1916, he told the House, was 96,000,000 cubic 
 
 90
 
 THE STERN FACTS 
 
 feet. On this basis, even allowing for the reduced imports now, the 
 shipping space used up by the drink trade during the war must be 
 over 200.000,000 cubic feet. 
 FOOD CONTROLLER AND THE STRENGTH OF BRITAIN 
 
 Lord Devonport, faced with the pressing problem of Bread or 
 Beer, has decided in favor of Bread — to the extent of 30' per cent. 
 He has cut down beer supplies and saved 800 tons of barley a day, 
 100 tons of sugar a day, 47 tons of grits a day. By reducing brewers' 
 supplies the Food Controller has saved nearly 1,000 tons of food a 
 day. A thousand tons of food will feed about a million people, so 
 that the cutting down of these supplies for beer is equal to saving 
 food for a million people every day. It will keep all Glasgow. 
 HOW DRINK DESTROYS OUR WAR STRENGTH— Official 
 
 The average expenditure on alcoholic drinks in this country 
 amounts to 7s. 3d. per family per week. If every family in the land 
 were to cut their drink bill down by, say, one-half, the amount would 
 come to £90,000,000 per annum ; the waste in lowered ability to work 
 now resulting from the consumption of alcohol would be largely 
 removed, and the gain in national working capacity would be even 
 greater than is represented by this monetary gain. — War Savings 
 Committee. 
 
 It follows from this oflicial admission that we have sacrificed 
 to drink one-tenth of our war bill and one-tenth of our war strength. 
 See page 66. 
 DRINK INJURIOUS TO NATIONAL INTERESTS— Official 
 
 Obviously, in the present national emergency, a daily expendi- 
 ture of practically £500,000 on spirits, wines, and beer cannot be 
 justified on the ground of necessity. This expenditure, therefore, 
 like every other form and degree of expenditure beyond what is re- 
 quired to maintain health and efficiency, is directly injurious to na- 
 tional interests. — War Savings Committee. 
 
 PROHIBITION AND WAR EFFICIENCY— Official 
 
 It is necessary to secure a state of aflfairs which would make it 
 possible for transport to be carried out with speed and efficiency. 
 At present this is impossible. In my opinion, measures are neces- 
 sary to withdraw all licenses to sell intoxicating liquors throughout 
 the country. — Director of Transports. March 27, 1915. 
 LOST MILLIONS OF THE WAR LOAN 
 
 If there had been no Drink Trade in this country our people 
 would have been able to lend the Government £400,000,000 more 
 for the 1917 War Loan, and our national expenditure during the 
 
 9;
 
 THE STERN FACTS 
 
 war would have been £400,000,000 less. In the last year of Drink 
 in Russia the people saved £8,000,000; in one year of Prohibition 
 they placed in their banks £177,000,000. Prohibition would have 
 saved us in drink expenditure, and its notorious result, £1,000,000 
 a day, and on this basis Prohibition during the war would have saved 
 nearly £1,000,000,000. 
 
 PROHIBITION INCREASES OUTPUT OF MUNITIONS 
 In a shipbuilding works at Nicolaiefif, Russia, these figures 
 have been taken for a month before and after Prohibition: 
 
 Before After Before After 
 
 Men employed. .3454 3483 Days lost 3576 1901 
 
 Men sick 740 377 Accidents 11 59 846 
 
 PROHIBITION WOULD PUT THE NATION IN EARNEST 
 
 Official 
 
 Total Prohibition, with all its attendant objections and disad- 
 vantages, would at least have the general effect that all classes 
 would at last realize the existence and seriousness of the war, and 
 that they were personally involved in its consequences. — Statement 
 by the Admiralty to the Cabinet, March 1915. 
 
 SOLDIERS AND MUNITION MEN DO NOT NEED 
 
 ALCOHOL— Official 
 
 The President of the Board of Trade having incited the Royal Society 
 to appoint scientific men of the highest distinction to report on the Food 
 Supply^ of the United Kingdom, the Committee reports: 
 
 Repeated experience has shown that regiments not supplied 
 with alcohol marched farther, and were in better condition at the 
 end of the day, than others to which it had been given. Experi- 
 ments in mountain climbing have given similar indications, the total 
 work done being smaller under alcohol and the expenditure of energy 
 greater. The records of American industrial experience are signifi- 
 cant in showing a better output when no alcohol is taken by the 
 workmen. 
 
 Captain Scott said: I believe alcohol is distinctly harmful to 
 persons doing continuous severe physical work. 
 
 ALCOHOL IS THE ENEMY OF THE WOUNDED SOLDIER 
 
 Sir Frederick Treves says: The person of all others I dread to 
 see enter the operating theatre is the drinker. 
 
 MOST EFFECTIVE ACT TO WIN WAR— Official 
 I cannot state too forcibly my own opinion that the Total Pro- 
 hibition of the sale of spirits would be the most effective act that 
 
 92
 
 THE STERN FACTS 
 
 could at the present time be taken to win this war. — Captain Bart- 
 telot, Admiralty Supt. on the Clyde, March 1915. 
 MAGISTRATES POWERLESS & ARMY APPEALS IN VAIN 
 
 The Aldershot command applied yesterday at Guildford licens- 
 ing sessions for the reduction of 50 per cent of licenses in the bor- 
 ough, but the magistrates decided they had no power to deal with 
 the matter. — Daily Chronicle, February 8, 1917. 
 
 THE SUNDAY WHEN THE MEN WENT OUT 
 
 A letter from a Camp in England to the authors of this book: 
 The drunkenness in this camp is deplorable. We are doing 
 what little we can to counteract this terrible influence, but we are 
 terribly handicapped. Only recently on a Sunday, when a draft was 
 leaving for the front in the evening, the Recreation Hut and the 
 neighboring Mission Hut were put out of bounds for the troops 
 from mid-day, and all the canteens were thrown open. The result 
 was that when the time came for the draft to start a large number 
 of the men were very drunk, and got out of hand. It is utterly im- 
 possible to understand the action of the authorities. 
 
 HOW DRINK FOR 1920 CROWDS OUR SHIPS AND DOCKS 
 
 We have whisky in this country to last till 1921,, but our man- 
 power has been making whisky since the war began. 
 
 We have rum in this country to last till 1921, but our ships are 
 importing rum still. 
 
 At this moment the vaults and warehouses in which we store 
 rum at the London docks are filled to overflowing; for a generation 
 past they have never been so full. Thousands of casks stand outside 
 the warehouses because th^re is not room for them inside and be- 
 cause there is not a vacant space on which they might stand while 
 the Customs staff examines them. The quantity of rum in these 
 casks is probably not less than 6,000,000 proof gallons. Let us as- 
 sume, in defiance of the Director-General of the Army Medical Ser- 
 vice, that rum is necessary for the Army and Navy. In 191 5 we 
 sent away for their use about 2.000.000 gallons. On that basis we 
 have, overcrowding our docks at this moment, a full supply to last 
 till 1920, yet there are thousands of casks of rum now on the sea for 
 London. They will arrive at a crowded quay with not an inch of 
 space available for them, and they cannot be needed for three years. 
 
 THE GRIP OF DRINK IN WAR-TIME 
 
 The Medway Guardians (see page. 103) invited the paupers to celebrate 
 Christmas by drinking the stuflf the King has banished from his house held 
 
 93
 
 THE STERN FACTS 
 
 as a traitor to the State. The following cases are in institutions in the 
 neighborhood or in the care of this Union. 
 
 A lad from the Derbyshire hills joined the Army, and came to 
 Chatham. He was a brisk and useful youth, but he fell before the 
 temptations we put in his way, and today he is in the hospital. He 
 lay like a log for five or six weeks. He has venereal disease, which 
 has touched his brain. "What was once a useful man is now a log," 
 says an Army officer. 
 
 Another man joined the Army and went to Chatham. He got 
 drunk, broke his leg, and was taken to a hospital. His wife, drawing 
 26s. 6d. weekly from the Army, drank and neglected her children, 
 and now lies in prison. The children are being cared for by the 
 Medway Union which gives free beer to its paupers! 
 
 There is also in this Union a man who earned £2 los. a week, 
 and supported his wife and six children. Through drink he lost his 
 character, his employment, and his home; and he and five of his 
 children are now in the workhouse, at a cost of perhaps £3 a week. 
 
 So drink takes men from camp and puts them in the hospital; it takes 
 men from industry and puts them in the workhouse; it takes children from 
 our homes and makes them paupers; and when Christmas comes the Medway 
 Guardians send round beer! A fig for the King who banishes it! A fig 
 for all who talk of sacrifice! Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for the brewers 
 are doubling their profits! 
 
 HOW DRINK HELD BACK CANADIAN RECRUITS 
 
 Canada has sent to the war 400,000 recruits. "But for your 
 failure to deal with this drink cancer at the heart of the Motherland," 
 a leader of public opinion in Canada has declared, 'T verily believe 
 we should have sent 100,000 more." 
 PROHIBITION MEANS GOOD BUSINESS AFTER THE WAR 
 
 A business report by Messrs. Sim & Coventry, metal merchants, 
 no Cannon street. London, pointing out the extensive develop- 
 ment in the United States tinplate trade, says : 
 
 There will be acute rivalry and cutting competition in the 
 years that are before us, and it will take all the Celtic wit and Saxon 
 grit available to struggle successfully against the post war situation. 
 The United States are gradually putting themselves into the strong- 
 est possible position to compete successfully with the whole world. 
 By a recent vote a still further area in the great Republic is to in- 
 troduce Prohibition, so that fully half the states have now "gone 
 dry." This means not only increased savings, but greater physical 
 power to compete, for has it not been repeatedly laid down during 
 the war that the absence of alcohol means largely increased effi- 
 ciency? This report has no relation to a temperance leaflet, but we 
 cannot forbear co lay stress on an aspect of the situation which we 
 believe cannot be ignored with impunity. 
 
 94
 
 CALENDAR OF THE FOOD CRISIS 
 
 Up to April 1 the brewers are destroying the equivalent of the 
 whole food supply of the nation one day in twelve. After April 1 
 they are to be permitted to destroy it only one day in eighteen. 
 N. B.— April 1 is called All Fools' Day. 
 
 Feb. 
 12 
 13 
 14 
 15 
 
 Jan. 
 
 1 Year of Defeat or Victory be- 
 gins 
 
 2 
 
 3 Food Shortage looms in sight 
 
 4 
 
 5 On this day Brewers may de- 
 stroy all the nation's food 
 
 6 
 
 7 
 
 8 
 
 9 
 10 
 
 11 Liess wheat arrives 
 
 12 Ships due with rum for 1920 
 13 
 
 14 
 15 
 16 
 
 17 On this day Brewers may de- 
 
 stroy all the nation's food 
 
 18 Meatless day suggested 
 
 19 Lunches must be cut down 
 20 
 
 21 
 22 
 23 
 
 24 Brewers, on Mr. Pro there's au- 
 
 thority, say they make milk 
 
 25 Food Controller restricts 
 
 brewing to make more milk 
 
 26 
 
 27 
 
 28 
 
 29 On this day Brewers may de- 
 stroy all the nation's food 
 
 30 
 
 31 
 
 Feb. 
 
 1 Mr. Prothero encourages hops, 
 
 as hopfields waste only 1% 
 days' food for the nation 
 
 2 Govt. Committee reports hops 
 
 yield nothing to the food 
 supply 
 
 6 
 
 7 
 
 8 
 
 9 
 
 10 
 
 11 
 
 Premier calls on every inch of 
 
 land for food 
 Owing to food shortage ration 
 
 system introduced by Lord 
 
 Devonport 
 
 On this day Brewers may de- 
 stroy all the nation's food 
 
 16 More food-ships sunk by Ger- 
 man submarines 
 17 
 18 
 19 
 20 
 21 
 
 22 On this day Brewers may de- 
 stroy all the nation's food 
 23 
 24 
 25 
 26 
 27 
 
 28 More food-carrying ships im- 
 periled by submarines 
 March 
 
 1 
 
 2 
 
 3 
 
 4 
 
 5 
 
 6 On this day Brewers may de- 
 
 stroy all the nation's food 
 
 7 Less sugar for wounded sol- 
 
 diers 
 
 8 
 
 9 
 10 
 11 
 12 
 IS 
 
 14 Pressure of food shortage in- 
 creases 
 15 
 16 
 17 
 
 18 On this day Brewers may de- 
 stroy all the nation's food 
 19 
 20 
 21 
 22 
 23 
 24 
 25 
 26 
 27 
 
 2S Fond shortage more grave 
 20 Acute shortage of sugar 
 30 On this day Brewers may de- 
 stroy all the nation's food 
 
 April 1 — All Fools' Day. From this day the brewers may destroy 
 the nation's food supply only every eighteenth day.
 
 ANTICIPATE ALL PUBLIC GATHERINGS - BE THERE WITH "DRY POWDER" 
 
 """"""., ^>«^^^^*" 
 
 MEET THE SITUATION 
 
 WITH 
 
 Organization 
 
 Get YOUR Organization Started at Work for 
 
 A DRY AMERICA 
 
 Here Is What Almost 
 Any Organization Can Do: 
 
 CHURCHES 
 
 SUNDAY SCHOOLS 
 
 BIBLE CLASSES 
 
 ENDEAVORS 
 
 LEAGUES 
 
 UNIONS 
 
 GRANGES 
 
 Y. M. C. A.'S 
 
 Y. W. C. A.'S 
 
 LODGES 
 
 CLUBS 
 
 COLLEGES 
 
 SCHOOLS 
 
 FRATERNITIES 
 
 SORORITIES 
 
 SOCIETIES 
 
 NIGHT SCHOOLS 
 
 LABOR UNIONS 
 
 FACTORIES 
 
 FIRMS 
 
 VETERANS 
 
 EVANGELISTS 
 
 CHAUTAUQUAS 
 
 SCOUTS 
 
 GUARDS 
 
 COMPANIES 
 
 UNIFORM RANKS 
 
 CONVENTIONS 
 
 CAMPS 
 
 RED CROSS 
 
 1. 
 
 3. 
 
 5. 
 6. 
 
 Pound Away at Washington 
 
 — With Dry telegrams, Dry letters, Dry petitions. 
 Work for No-License at Home 
 
 — Under direction of your own State League. 
 Push Temperance Education 
 
 — In Schools, Sunday Schools, Vacant Buildings, Parks. 
 4. Organize Local Talent Dry Rallies, Quartets, Platforrn Clubs 
 
 — At Schoolhouses, Granges, Halls, Churches Picnics. 
 Report Law Violations to Authorities 
 
 — Band together to Demand Enforcement. 
 Circulate Dry Literature 
 
 — To fit the Times and the Crowd. 
 
 ARE YOU A DRY ROOKIE.? 
 
 In a very short while, every hamlet, village, town and city in the country will see 
 its boys drilling — getting ready to meet the grim responsibilities and dangerous tempta- 
 tions of war. Mothers' hearts are tremulous — fearing the latter far more than the 
 former. What are you doing to help prepare these boys — your "bit?" 
 
 This Is No Time to Hesitate. EVERY TEMPERANCE PATRIOT Should Be at Work 
 
 The camp followers of rum are plotting treason — there's no other word to use ! 
 
 SEND A QUARTER FOR SAMPLE TEMPERANCE PATRIOTS' BUDGET 
 
 It will furnish you with working ideas, show samples of dry literature of a patriotic 
 nature, and HELP YOU GET STARTED RIGHT. Do it today. 
 
 AMERICAN ISSUE PUBLISHING CO., Department of Literature, Westerville, Ohio 
 
 OUR HOMES— OUR SOLDIERS— OUR COUNTRY— OUR FLAG
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
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 •ep^ERi^naironeiipi^^iFffi nn^^Hp looa lor 
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 England's. 
 
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