One afternoon we had to postpone our conference in Paris, and the French Minister of Finance said, “I have to go to the Chamber of Deputies, because I am proposing a bill to abolish absinthe.” Absinthe plays the same part in France that whisky plays in this country, and they abolished it by a majority of something like ten to one that afternoon.
And how did Paris take this prohibition that men said would cause a revolution? Let us ask Mr. Philip Gibbs, whose splendid letters home have made his name a household word. Mr. Philip Gibbs:
Absinthe was banned by a thunderstroke, and Parisians who had acquired the absinthe habit trembled in every limb at this judgment which would reduce them to physical and moral wrecks. But the edict was given and Paris obeyed, loyally and with resignation.
And now we come to Russia, to these mighty Russian people who in the last year of vodka saved £6,000,000 or £7,000,000, and in the last full year of Prohibition saved £177,000,000. We will call our own Prime Minister again:
Russia, knowing her deficiency, knowing how unprepared she was, said, “I must pull myself together. I am not going to be trampled upon, unready as I am. I will use all my resources.” What is the first thing she does? She stops drink.
I was talking to M. Bark, the Russian Minister of Finance, and I asked, “What has been the result?” He said, “The productivity of labour, the amount of work which is put out by the workmen, has gone up between 30 and 50 per cent.”
I said, “How do they stand it without their liquor?” and he replied, “Stand it? I have lost revenue over it up to £65,000,000 a year and we certainly cannot afford it, but if I proposed to put it back there would be a revolution in Russia.”
How completely teetotal Russia became we read long ago in the Daily Mail, to which Mr. Hamilton Fyfe sent this message from Petrograd:
Try to imagine all the publichouses in the British Isles closed; all the restaurants putting away their wine cards and offering nothing stronger than cider or ginger ale. That is the state of things in Russia. Strange it seems indeed, yet there is one thing stranger. Nobody makes any audible complaint.
Everywhere in Russia it was the same: a nation was made sober by Act of Parliament.