Part 2

The Tunes They Play

Strange tunes we hear the fiddlers play, but their music does not charm away the troubles of a famine-threatened land. From morning till night the prayer of the people rises, “Give us this day our daily bread,” but the heart of Downing Street is hardened, and the nation’s bread goes day by day to the destroyer.

But all the time we see the measure of the courage of our rulers on the hoardings in the streets. We know their posters by heart.

_Defeat the enemy’s attempt to starve you_, by—not by stopping the destruction of food, but by joining the National Service, and probably helping to pick hops. There was a man in a co-operative store who volunteered for National Service, and last month he received instructions _to leave the grocery store and take up duty in a brewery_.

_Sow your window-boxes and plant your back gardens_—and Mr. Prothero will see that the soil of a million back gardens is wasted on hops.

_We have not enough food to last till the harvest_—why not go out and catch rabbits, asks Lord Devonport—and sit and wait for sparrows?

_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 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.

_God speed the plough and the woman who drives it_—yes, and God help the woman who drives the plough to feed the brewer while her little ones cry for bread.

_Let us fine £5 whoever wastes a loaf_, says the Food Controller—but not, of course, the brewers who waste 450,000 quartern loaves a day.

Hops are no use as food to anybody, says the Board of Trade Scientific Committee. “_Then let us grow only half as many_,” said Mr. Prothero.

Mr. Lloyd George says Mr. Prothero is working “in a continuous rattle of mocking laughter and gibes.” Yes, it is the mocking laughter of a nation that is not really amused by sights like this. The nation does not like to see the bread rations of 70,000 men in France cut down while 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. It does not like to see Y. M. C. A. canteens denied supplies of sugar while barrels of beer are stacked in great piles outside. 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_.

Oh, these fiddlers! And now we have a new idea from the Food Control Department; it is a coloured poster of a Union Jack and a big loaf on it, and “Waste not, Want not,” printed in big type. It was being printed on the day the Prime Minister told the nation that America had found it is no use waving a neutral flag in the teeth of a shark. It is an eloquent and true saying, but it is also true, that it is no use waving platitudes from copybooks in the teeth of a wolf at the door. The Prime Minister says he is taking no chances. Let us be quite sure. We once had a Government of which men said its motto was “Wait and See.” _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.

_With the Shell Famine at its height—largely made by Drink—the Prohibition Army on the East held up the enemy while Britain fought the Drink Trade for her shells._

_With the Bread Famine looming in sight—largely made by Drink—the Prohibition Navy from the West flings in her power against the submarines._

Oh, for the spirit of our Allies in this land! If France wants to rouse the spirit of Verdun she strikes down her foe at home and puts absinthe away. If Russia wants to be great and free she stops this drink and orders out the Romanoffs. If Canada wants to give her utmost help to Britain she stops this drink from sea to sea. If Australia wants to make her soldiers fit she trains them in her Prohibition camps. If America wants to beat the whole world at making shells she drives drink from her workshops. If San Francisco has an earthquake she stops drink while she pulls herself together. If Liverpool has a dangerous strike she shuts up public-houses and keeps the city quiet. Oh, for a Government of Britain that will see what all the world can see!

History will do justice to the part the Prohibition policy of the Allies has played in saving Europe, but a pamphlet has no room for these things. We can take only one or two great witnesses to the mighty achievements of our Prohibition Allies. Let us begin with France, and call our own Prime Minister to tell us what they did. Mr. Lloyd George:

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.

“Without a murmur of protest,” said the Moscow correspondent of the _Times_, “the most drunken city in Europe was transformed into a temple of sobriety, and we felt that if Russia could thus conquer herself in a night, there was indeed nothing that might not be accomplished.” And two years later, when the revolution came, we read in the _Times_ this note from Odessa: “Perfect tranquillity continues to prevail here, although for the moment Odessa is practically without police. The satisfactory absence of crime may largely be attributed to the sealing up of spirituous liquors.”

We need not be afraid of Drinkless Revolutions.

But the truth about Russia is almost too incredible to believe, for it is Prohibition that made the revolution possible; it was stopping drink that set 170,000,000 people free. We will let a business correspondent of the _Times_ give evidence; here is what he said on April 21, 1917:

In one respect it must be said that the Reactionaries saw clearly. They always claimed that the Tsar had ruined himself by decreeing the abolition of vodka. None but a sober people could have carried out the Russian Revolution.

The police were, on the other hand, the victims of drink. They had seized the vodka at the order of the Government, and had kept plentiful supplies for themselves. Thus the Revolution was in part a struggle between drunken reaction and sober citizens. Sobriety triumphed.

The Russian people will not bow down and tie their hands to the thrones of Europe: do we wonder if they scorn our quailing before this trade?

Free Russia flings off the dynastic yoke: do we wonder Prohibition Russia is not much impressed by a nation with a Drink Trade round its neck?

The Soldier’s Home

The things that will be told against this trade when all the truth is known will break the heart of those who read. It is well for us that we cannot know the full truth now; the burden would be too grievous to be borne in days like these. But if you will go into your street, or will talk of these things with the next man you meet from one of our pitiful slums, or will pick up one of those local papers that still have space to print the truth, you will find the evidence close about you.

We are the guardians of our soldiers’ homes; we are the trustees of the hope and happiness of their little children; but we let this drink trade, that takes our people’s food out of their cupboards, turn that food into the means of death, and sow ruin and destruction through the land.

But we will call the witnesses to these drink-ruined soldiers’ homes, these homes that the enemy worse than Germany has shattered and broken while our men have been fighting for your home and mine. 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.

_Records of Balham Coroner, March 1916_

A soldier who had left a comfortable home behind returned from the Front to find it ruined, with not a bed to lie on, his children never sent to school, his wife all the time in publichouses. “I wish I had been shot in the trenches,” he said when he arrived.

_Facts in “Cork Constitution,” December 10, 1915_

Outside a publichouse in Liverpool a man was dragging home his drunken wife, the mother of eleven children. They rolled over and over on the ground, the drunken women violently resisting the maddened man. Then came up the eldest son, home from the Front, with five wounds in his body.

_Facts in “Liverpool Post,” March 2, 1917_

A soldier came back to his home in London to find his wife drinking his money away, harbouring another man; one of his children cruelly neglected and the other in its grave, perished from neglect; and a drunken carman’s baby about to be born in his home.

_Facts in Shaftesbury Society Report_

A Lance-Corporal heard in the trenches of his wife’s misconduct. His commanding officer wrote to make inquiries, and the soldier wrote to the Chief Constable a pitiful letter: “What have I to look forward to at the end of the war?” he said. “Nothing, only sorrow. I never get a letter to know how my loving son is getting on; I think it will drive me mad.”

He came home, opened the door of his house, threw his kit on the floor, and declared that he would kill his wife. He put a razor on the table, and his little boy hid it in a cupboard, but a week later this boy of 12 went home and found his father and mother lying on the floor, the father drunk, the mother dead. The soldier, drowning his misery in drink, had strangled his wife. Rousing himself beside her, he said, as the police found them, “Kiss me, Sally. Aye, but tha are poorly.”

He had been the best of fathers, said the little boy; the best of soldiers, said his commanding officer; and the judge declared that such a man, with such a character, ought not to be with criminals.

_Record of Huddersfield Assizes, Autumn 1916_

A soldier asked a London magistrate if he could draw the allowance instead of his wife, who was in prison for drunkenness and was neglecting his four children. The magistrate said the only thing was to send the children to the workhouse.

The Soldier: “So I am to be a soldier for my King and country while my children go to the workhouse?” The Magistrate: “That is so, because you have a drunken wife. I am sorry for you.”

_Facts in “Sunday Herald,” June 1916_

A seaman gunner, who had been torpedoed and had fought in the trenches, arrived home to find his wife, in his own words, “filthy drunk,” and his children utterly deplorable. He reclothed them, but his wife pawned the clothes, though she had £7 a month. He took his children away, but a crowd of women interfered with him, and the police were powerless against the mob.

_Facts in “Western Daily Mercury,” July 23, 1915_

A soldier just back from the Front was found in the street weeping bitterly on discovering that his wife was in gaol through drink, and his child, through her neglect, had been burned.

_Statement by Marchioness of Waterford_

A soldier came home from the Front to find that drink had ruined his home, and his children were being cared for by Glasgow Parish Council. “Hour after hour we sit on this council,” says the chairman, “listening to case after case, and the cause is drunkenness, drunkenness, drunkenness. There are 2300 children under the council, and two thousand of them have parents living.” “Our raw material is the finished product of the public-house,” says one of these workers.

_Facts from Glasgow Councillors_

A motor mechanic at the Front, hearing that his wife, hitherto a sober woman, had given way to drink, obtained leave to come home. He found his wife, very drunk, struggling home with the help of the railings in the street, and neighbours described her horrible life with other soldiers. The husband obtained a separation for the sake of his children, and went back to France.

_Full facts in “Kent Messenger,” July 31, 1915_

A young soldier came from the trenches to spend Christmas in his home in Sheffield—a teetotal home before the war. He found that his wife had given way to drink, had deserted one child and disappeared with the other, and that a baby was to be born which was not his.

_Facts known to the Author_

A miner fighting at the Front came home to find his wife at a publichouse, his home filthy, and his children cruelly neglected. He was heartbroken. His young wife frequently left the house from tea-time till midnight, and in order to keep the children from the fire she had burned them severely with a piece of iron. A respectable-looking woman, the mother pleaded for a chance, and was led from the dock sobbing bitterly.

_Facts in “Sheffield Independent,” February 21, 1917_

A young Yorkshire miner enlisted and left his wife, hitherto sober, with three children. She took to drink, neglected the home, and is now a dipsomaniac, with two children not her husband’s.

_Facts known to the Author_

A soldier came home ill from France, hurried from Waterloo to his home, and found the door locked. He knocked, and his little boy’s voice came—“Is that you, mother, and are you drunk?” Hearing his father’s voice the excited lad opened the door. “Where’s mother?” asked his father. “Mother?” said the boy; “she’s drinking. She comes home drunk night after night now and knocks the kids about. She daren’t hit _me_; I’m fair strong, dad; but the other.... And as for baby, she never does nothing for her. I and Freddy takes turns, but I dunno what to give her to eat sometimes.”

Midnight passed before the mother appeared, helplessly drunk. “Did you expect me to sit at home weeping for you?” she said. The next morning, broken with tears, she promised to mend her ways. The soldier went into hospital, and there he had a letter from his boy. This is part of it:

“Dear Dad, I write to let you know mother is going on awful. She has took all Fred and Timmy’s clothes to the pawnshop, and she hit Selina on Saturday with the toasterfork and cut her face. She cried all night, it hurt her so. She is drunk every night and some nights dussent come back at all. She daren’t hit me, but I am getting afraid about baby. We are all very hungry and miserable.”

The soldier got leave, found his wife had disappeared, and, finding charity for his four little ones, he left his ruined home and went back to the hospital.

_Facts in possession of the Author_

A working-man at Gravesend went to the Front, leaving behind a wife and three children, the baby lately born. His wife started drinking away her allowance, neglected her home, and, full of remorse and shame for the disgrace she had brought on the man who was in the trenches, she hanged herself. The man came home to find waiting for him three motherless children, and one of the most pathetic letters a man has ever had to read.

_Records of Gravesend Coroner, 1916_

Mothers and Children

It is easy to understand the pitiful appeal of 500 women out of Holloway Prison who begged the Duchess of Bedford to help to close all public-houses during the war. They know in their hearts of tragedies such as these, in which mothers and children die while the fathers fight and the Drink Trade goes on merrily.

A soldier’s wife in Sunderland drew £12 arrears of Army pay, and she and her mother began to drink it away. She drew her pay on Friday, was carried home drunk on Saturday, gave birth to twins on Sunday morning, and died on Sunday night. The twins died a week or two after, and a week or two after that the soldier came home from the trenches to find his family in the grave.

_Facts in Sunderland papers, 1917_

Two women went drinking in Chester on a Sunday night, a soldier’s mother and a soldier’s wife. They had five whiskies each, and fell drunk in the street. One slept all night on a sofa, and the other lay on the floor, shouting and swearing. Her husband propped her up with a mat, and for hours she lay shrieking. In the morning she was dead. The publican was fined £5.

_Facts in “Chester Chronicle,” February 17, 1917_

The wife of a Yorkshire soldier was drowned while drunk at Sheffield. She started drinking with another soldier’s wife disappeared with a drunken man, and her death was a mystery.

_Facts in “Sheffield Independent,” April 26, 1916_

At an inquest on the bodies of a soldier’s twin children, both dead from chronic wasting, it was stated that the mother had 34_s._ a week, and both she and her husband drank. The mother had had four children in fifteen months, and all were dead.

_Records of Battersea Coroner, October 1915_

In one street in London where there were one day four convictions for drunkenness, a woman carried a sick baby into a public house. As she stood at the bar the little baby died, but the mother went on drinking, with the dead child in her arms.

_Records of Charity Organisation Society_

The wife of a highly-esteemed sergeant-major fighting in France was found lying drunk. Her four children, shockingly neglected, were put in a home, but she took them out, went on drinking, and received soldiers at her house. In a few weeks her husband heard in the trenches that his wife had died from drinking.

_Records of West Surrey Coroner, March 1917_

A soldier left three children at home. He had been earning £1 a week, but his wife received 32_s._ 6_d._ a week. She drank it away, neglected the children, and died in an asylum while her husband was in France.

_Records of Claybury Asylum_

The little child of a soldier in France died in Guy’s Hospital from burns. The mother said she could not buy a fireguard. While she was absent the baby was burned, and the mother, returning in a drunken state carrying a can of beer, said, “A good job!”

_Records of Southwark Coroner, December 1915_

A soldier’s widow with six children, an Army pension of 30_s._ a week, and her eldest boy’s wages of 30_s._, drinks every night with a married man who has a respectable, clean, and sober wife with eight children and a ninth lately born—born prematurely as a result of her husband’s beating her. The child bore the marks of his violence, and died in two months.

_Records of Shaftesbury Society_

The young wife of a soldier was brought from prison to be tried for manslaughter of her baby, who had died in the infirmary from neglect. She spent her time in the publichouses, and laughed when the children were taken to the infirmary. She went out one day to fetch a bottle of whisky and as she drank with a neighbour she said she knew the baby would die. The doctor said the child’s skin was hanging in folds on the bones.

_Facts in the “Observer,” January 23, 1916_

A soldier’s wife drank continuously while her child wasted away, left the tiny baby alone in the house while she went for beer, and a policeman found her lying drunk across the dead child’s body.

_Records of Barnsley Coroner, November, 1916_

The mother of two children whose father was fighting in France gave way to drink in his absence, neglected her children and left them in grave moral danger, and committed suicide.

_Records of an Orphan Home_

A soldier’s baby starved slowly to death as the mother drank away his pay, and while the child lay in its coffin the mother was out drinking.

_West Bromwich Police Records, June 1915_

A munition worker at Newcastle was grievously upset by the drinking habits of his wife. The police left a summons for her and she disappeared. Two days later her body was found in the Tyne. The man broke down at the inquest, saying, between his sobs: “She was such a good wife to me for 20 years, and reared a good family before she took to drink.”

_Records of Newcastle Coroner, Summer 1916_