Arthur Mee

“ 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. ”

“ We must not eat more than our share, on our honour—but the man across the table can eat his share of bread and drink somebody else’s too.
We must eat less and eat slowly—so that brewers may waste more and waste quickly.
We must keep back famine—but not by using malt, says Captain Bathurst: that would cost three times as much as letting famine come. But why not keep the malt till bread is as dear as gold?
Let all heads of households abstain from using grain except in bread, says the King’s Proclamation. But let the brewers waste 8,000 tons a day for beer, says the Government. ”

“ Not for one hour has the full strength of Britain been turned against her enemies. From the first day of the war, while our mighty Allies have been striking down this foe within their gates, Britain has let this trade stalk through her streets, serving the Kaiser’s purposes, and paying the Government £1,000,000 a week for the right to do it.
She has let this trade destroy our food and bring us to the verge of famine; she has let it keep back guns and shells and hold up ships; she has let it waste our people’s wealth in hundreds of millions of pounds ”

“ It cannot be said that a Government with such desperate excuses is in earnest. We do not wonder that a great American farmers’ paper, with no axe to grind except that it is sane and patriotic and believes in the war, is asking plain questions as America prepares her Prohibition Army, her Prohibition Navy, and stops the destruction of grain for drink in order to enter the war at full strength. ”

“ Or, while we must have yeast, we need about 30,000 tons a year for the whole United Kingdom, and since the prohibition of hops in June last year we have given enough shipping to hops every fortnight to bring in enough yeast for a year. A Government with shipping to spare like that, with room on its ships for mountains of hops, for enormous brewers’ vats, and for rum for 1921, can find room for 100 tons a day of the people’s bread. It is a monstrous perversion of the facts to suggest that we must maintain this food-destroying trade, with all its hideous tragedy and ruin, in order to make bread. ”

“ We are not going to lose the war through the submarines if we all behave like reasonable human beings who want to save their country from disaster, privation and distress.
The Prime Minister What are we to say of a Government that plays with war and drink and famine while these brave words are ringing in our ears?
If the situation is so desperate that we must all go short of food, it is desperate enough for the Government to be in earnest. But what are the plain facts? No reasonable man who knows them can say that the Government is in earnest. ”

“ Those Who Will Not Go Back It is the great consolation of Canada that, though their sons may fall before this tempter’s trade in Britain, they will go back to a Canada free from drink. But some will never go back, and they are not on the Roll of Honour. They have been destroyed by the enemy within our gate, this trade that traps men on their way to France and digs their graves.
A young Canadian who had never tasted alcohol came from a Prohibition camp in Canada, came to England on a Prohibition ship, and was put in a camp with a drink canteen. ”

“ Britain has not seen fit to prohibit the use of cereals in the manufacture of drink, notwithstanding that the world’s food supply was obviously short. Are Americans required to forego a part of their accustomed ration of bread in order that their British Allies can continue to have a plentiful supply of beer and whisky? If not, then Britain should lose no time in putting its house in order, quitting the drink to add to the common store of food upon which the safety of all the Allies depends. ”

“ December 2, 1916 The Men From the Prohibition Camps Again and again we have seen the peculiar temptations of drink among Canadians. Officers, chief-constables, chaplains, newspapers, the men themselves, have all borne witness that to these men from Prohibition Canada the sudden temptations of our drink trade come with terrible power, and often they fall not knowing. The finest manhood of the Empire our tap-rooms and canteens destroy, not in isolated cases, but in a host we dare not number. ”

“ We have scorned it all. The Prime Minister has said that this drink trade is so horrible that it is worth this horrible war to settle with it, yet we have sacrificed the love of Canada on our brewers’ altar. We can believe the Canadian who declares his profound conviction that but for this Canada would have sent us 100,000 more recruits; we can believe it is true that where responsible Canadians meet together in these days the talk is of how long the tie will last unbroken that binds the daughter to the Motherland. ”

“ Are we better off, or are we worse, with a Government that Sees and Waits?
But there is no end to the fiddling. With Food Controllers who hold up food for Food Destroyers; with Food Economy Handbooks that cry out loud to save the crumbs but have no word to say about the tons we fling away; with a Prime Minister praying for window-boxes and a Board of Agriculture consecrating hopfields, we need not be surprised if the nation is not mightily impressed.
How the Allies Did It All the world knows, except, apparently, the world that goes round at Westminster, how Prohibition has helped the Allies. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Canada has followed the King; arming herself with her full powers, flinging herself upon her enemies with her utmost strength, she has swept drink out of Canada almost from sea to sea. But even before she did this Canada saw that alcohol must go from her camps if her men were to be fit to fight for England, and long before the Prohibition wave swept across the country, the Canadian Government removed all alcohol from the training camps. ”

“ Canada has the right to make this demand on the Motherland from the simple standpoint of political economics. That we might put the Dominion into the best possible shape to give the utmost of our strength in men and munitions, we have an almost Dominion-wide Prohibition, and no intelligent person will deny that our contributions to the war from the first have been multiplied and intensified by that action. ”

“ More men take to drink because of the ‘have another’ custom than because they like or need alcohol, and simple Prohibition would stop all this nonsense straight away. This kindly note is not the outpouring of a teetotal fanatic, for I suppose I have paid in my time rather more than my share of the nation’s drink-bill; it is merely a perfectly sound argument in favour of increasing the nation’s efficiency at the expense of its chief bad habit. ”

“ When war is succeeded by peace there will come a time of trial for those who have never turned their backs to a bodily enemy. With the passing of military discipline our brave fellows will be tempted to forget the hardships and miseries of the trenches in a burst of uncontrolled pleasure and license, and, if trade be bad and work difficult to obtain, the lapse may, if not checked, become a step on a downward career. ”

“ The nation does not like to see the bread rations of 70,000 men in France cut down 14while the Drink Trade is destroying every week bread enough to last these men a year. It does not like to see the Government sending letters out to managers of factory canteens, begging them to be careful of bread, while food flows through our beer canteens like a river running to waste. ”

“ Since the United States will be called upon to make food sacrifices on behalf of the Allies, it is certainly in order to call to account the stewardship of Great Britain in regard to food supplies. Ordinarily America would have no right to demand such an account, but Americans are now asked to deny themselves that Britain may have sufficient. ”

“ It does not like the calling up of discharged soldiers while thousands of strong men are working hard all day destroying food or carting beer about the streets; and it does net like the tragic comedies of Captain Bathurst, who warns us that it really may become necessary in the national interest—and then, perhaps, he drops his voice to break it very gently—it really may become necessary, if these cake shops are not very careful, to whitewash the lower part of their windows. ”

“ The Dominion of Canada, giving freely to the Motherland 450,000 boys and men, was moved to passionate indignation that England should scorn her love for them, should ignore the pleadings of their mothers and sisters, and should put in their way the temptations from which they were saved at home. ”

“ The grain and sugar destroyed for drink have been:
How Canada sees it—A Canadian cartoon of the callous destruction of bread for beer and whisky
It is not easy to realize what this means, but it will help us if we think of one or two examples.
The biggest thing ever set up on earth is the Great Pyramid. It is 80,000,000 cubic feet. The food destroyed by drink during the war would make two Great Pyramids, each bigger than the Pyramid of Egypt.
The longest British railway is the Great Western; it is over 3,000 miles, but it would not hold the food destroyed by drink since war began. ”

“ We must remember that it makes no difference that the barley has been malted; it is still good human food, and every ounce of it should be mixed with grain for making bread. Let us remember, also, that brewer’s sugar is a good pure sugar, the objection to it being largely the objection most of us have to standard bread—its colour. Malt or sugar, every ounce a brewer destroys is food stolen from the people. ”

“ While this book was being written one of the greatest meetings ever held in Manchester was cheering a Canadian in khaki who declared that he was not going hungry while brewers were destroying food, and he went on to say, this soldier and sportsman well-known in the Dominion:
“Great numbers of our men never saw France. Canadian boys cried because they had not munitions. England reeled and beer flowed like water while thousands of our boys went down into their graves. We will never forget it in Canada.” ”

“ We must save every pound of bread we can to get over our critical weeks—not by saving the quartern loaf that beer is taking every month from every British cupboard now, but by going hungry so that drinkers may not thirst. ”

“ We will call a few here and there, knowing that for every one called are hundreds more that can be called, and that beyond all these that are known there is in this little land a countless host of tragedies as secret as the grave.
A Tooting soldier whose wife had sent him loving letters to the trenches came back to surprise her after 18 months. He found another man in possession of his home and a new baby; and, overcome by the discovery, he gave way to drink and killed himself. ”

“ We appreciated from the depths of our hearts, your action in abolishing the Wet Canteen from the Canadian Militia. We believe the Wet Canteen established in the ranks of the front to be a double danger, robbing our King of the success in arms which in these days comes only to the brave heart that is controlled by a clear head, and robbing us and our Canada of the Manhood which we gave into our Empire’s keeping. ”