By what right does the Government
use our mine-sweepers to bring in food for brewers to destroy? allow brewers to increase the cost of living for every household? and allow the willful destruction of food supplies to imperil the health of the poor?
The Way for the Government
We do not want to be amused by fiddlers while our heroes fight and die.
What are the things we see? We see the Government silent in the presence of what the greatest paper in our greatest overseas Dominion calls “the blackest tragedy of the war.” We see a trade which the King declared to be prolonging the war in the crisis of 1915, prolonging it still in the crisis of 1917. We see our Prime Minister, who has declared this trade to be worse than Germany, allowing it to have its way. We see our Prime Minister, who has said we cannot settle with Germany until we have settled with drink, fearing to settle with drink. Then are we not to settle with Germany, and are we to surrender to the greatest enemy of the three?
There is one clear way before the Government; it is the only way of straightness and patriotism and honour. It is to wind up this enemy trade and move from our path the greatest hindrance to the winning of the war. It is to take our side honourably with our great Allies, to bring to an end the shameful isolation of Great Britain in the drink map of the great free countries that appears on the back of this book.
It is the sign of weakness everywhere that it seeks a scapegoat for its sins, and we hear the everlasting talk of Labour. But it will not do. It is time these slanders on our workmen ceased.
If the Government is afraid of the working man, let it say so, or let it try him. If it is afraid of temperance people, let it rally them to its side as one man on the platform where they meet. If it is afraid of the Drink Trade, then the time has come to say so, for we who send out our millions to fight a foreign foe are not going to starve for bread through fear of enemies within our gate. The Prime Minister gave the Army its munitions; the Army will use them in vain unless the munitions of life come into our homes.
Working men are tired of men who fool with food and liberty. They do not object to any equal sacrifice: they believe in the democratic policy of the King, who based Prohibition, not on class distinction as the Government did by closing tap-rooms 15 hours a day and leaving cellars and Parliamentary bars open always, but on the principle of the King’s own words that “no difference shall be made, so far as his Majesty is concerned, between the treatment of the rich and poor in this respect.” Let the Government follow the King, and the people will follow the Government.