“To sum up, the Society advocates the retention of the present law so far as classes (a) and (b) are concerned, but would most strongly urge the addition of powers to deal with that great majority of inebriates whom the present law does not touch.”
The friends of alcohol.—Those who defend the alcoholic poisoning of the race may be easily classified. Some few honestly stand for liberty. Like Archbishop Magee, they would rather see England free than England sober, not asking in what sense England drunken could be called free. Some are merely irritated by the temperance fanatic. Many fear that their personal comfort may be interfered with. But probably the overwhelming majority are concerned with their pockets. They live by this cannibal trade; by selling death and the slaughter of babies, feeble-mindedness and insanity, consumption and worse diseases, crime and pauperism, degradation of body and mind in a thousand forms, to the present generation and therefore to the future, the unconsulted party to the bargain. Their motto is “Your money and your life.” So powerful are they that most of them are frank. They form associations for their defence, and hold mass meetings at which they condemn any temperance measure that is before the country, “whilst ready to welcome any real temperance reform.” They demand adequate compensation: though, if they disgorged every farthing they possess, and devoted themselves body and soul for the rest of their lives to the human cause, they could never compensate us who are alive, let alone the dead or the unborn, for the human ruin on which they build their success. They build their palaces before our eyes; one of the largest and newest, not far from Piccadilly Circus, I often pass; but where most see only fine stone, the student of infant mortality, the lover of children, he who works and looks for the life of this world to come, sees the bodies of the children of men and is tempted to recall the curse of Joshua, “He shall lay the foundation thereof in his firstborn, and in his youngest son shall he set up the gates of it.”
Alcoholic Imperialism.—At least let the alcoholic party refrain from calling themselves Imperialists. Amongst them, for instance, is the “Imperial bard,” the “poet of empire,” he who has appealed to the “god of our fathers,” and who warns us lest it shall be said that “all our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre”: and appeals to deity—
“Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!”
This prophet of what some may think a blasphemous Imperialism gives his name to the association which frankly in this matter of alcohol stands for gold as against life. We are to beware lest “drunk with sight of power” we boast as do the “lesser breeds” to whom the “awful Hand” of God has not granted dominion: nor are we to put our trust in reeking tube and iron shard. We may freely call ourselves Imperialists, however, even though we should be numbered amongst those whom Ruskin, himself the son of a wine merchant, called the “vendors of death.” One wonders whether the “Lord God” exists that he can withhold his “awful Hand” at such a spectacle as this. If some amongst us are to win gold by the sale of this racial poison, and if it must be so, let them at least be consistent, and label themselves the very littlest of little Englanders, which they are. An alcoholic Imperialism is of the kind which no Empire can long survive.
Those of us whom such things as these make sick, and who yet, with true poets like Wordsworth, are proud of “the tongue that Shakespeare spake,” and who with him declare:—
“It is not to be thought of that the Flood
Of British freedom, which, to the open sea
Of the world's praise, from dark antiquity
Hath flowed, ······
·········
That this most famous Stream in bogs and sands
Should perish; and to evil and to good
Be lost for ever”
—those of us who know that the foundations of any empire are living men and women, and that, to quote Mr. Kipling, “when breeds are in the making everything is worth while,” may wonder what process has been afoot that in three generations English poetry should pass from the sonnets of Wordsworth to “Duke's son, cook's son,” etc.; and may even at times, especially those of us who know what alcohol costs in life, feel a momentary recession of our faith that Great Britain need not now be writing the last page of her great history. Meanwhile, we read the controversy in Parliament and the press concerning alcohol. We see the cannibal cause of beer and spirits, which makes many widows and orphans every day,[74] represented, with an effrontery to which no parallel can ever be imagined, as the cause of widows and children, and we recall the lines which Wordsworth wrote rather more than a century ago:—
“How piteous, then, that there should be such dearth
Of knowledge; that whole myriads should unite
To work against themselves such fell despite;
Should come in frenzy and in drunken mirth,
Impatient to put out the only light
Of liberty that yet remains on earth!”