The Benefits of Drinking.

Hokitika Guardian, 6 December 1919, Page 1

The Benefits of Drinking.

>-**«>••*—< ini iticoßK si'O Dangers « moMim

WARNING TO BRITAIN.

“It is time that people in England should 'have proper warning of the social catastrophe which has overwhelmed America,” says Mr Steplieh Leacock, head of the department of political economy at McGill University, Montreal, as well as a humorous novelist, writing on the warning of prohibition in America in the “National Review,” jttst issued. “While there -is yet time the danger should he averted. 1 ‘From the crusade of a despised minority, a mark for good-natured ridicule rather than fear, the prohibition movement became a Vast continental propaganda, hacked by unlimited money, engineered by organised hypocrisy. Under the stress of war it masqueraded ns the crowning effort of patriotism. 'The war over, it sits enthroned as a social tyranny, backed by the full force of the law.

“A similar situation obtains in Canada. Hero ell 'of the ■‘nine provinces have voted themselves dry. The dryness is actually in force in eight of them,” says Mr Leacock, who then describes how this state of affairs was created in Canada. JUT UY BIT. “There was no question at first of total national prohibition. The thing was done bit by hit. Municipalities voted themselves ‘dry’ with but littlo opposition. The individual citizen still able to order his ‘liquor’ from the outside gave hut little heed to what Was happening.

“National prohibition, let it he 'observed, has not been adopted either in the United States or ih Canada by a popular vote. It never would be. It ■lias been carried only by the votes of tho Legislatures, by the actions of the politicians responsive to the demand of the minority. But the great mass of the people took no action. There has grown up, indeed, among all those who ought to be the leaders of public opinion a strange conspiracy of silence. Nobody seems willing to bear witness to how widely diffused is the habit of normal wholesome drinking, and of the gt-eat benefits to be derived from it.

IN MORE CHEERFUL DAYS

“The university where I have worked for nearly twenty years contains in its faculties a great number of scholarly, industrious men whose life-work cannot he derided or despised even by the salaried agitator of a prohibitionist society. Yet the great majority ’of

them ‘drink.’ I use that awful word in the full gloomy sense given to it by tho teetotaler. I moan that if you ask these men to dinner and offer them a glass ■of wine they will take it. Some will take two. I have even seen them take Scotch and. soda. “Of the clergy I cannot speak. But in days more cheerful than the present gloomy times there were.at least those of them who thought a glass of port no very dreadful sin. ... THE WORKING MAN. “But these people, one might object, are but a class, and a small one at that. What about the ordinary working man ? Surely he is not to ho sacrificed for the sake of the leisure hours of intellectual classes !' But here, so it seems i to me, is where the strongest argument; against prohibition comes in. . . .

The lot of tho working man who begins day labour at the ago of 16 and ends it at the age of 70, who starts work every morning while the rest of us are still in lied, who has no sleep after his lunch and no vacation trip to Florida, is inconceivably. hard. “It is a sober fact that if those of Us who are doctors, lawyers, professors, and merchants were suddenly transferred by some evil magician to the rank of a working man, we should feel much as if we had been sent to tho petit tentiaty. And i‘t is equally a fact that wc should realise jUst how much a glass of ale and a pipe of tobacco mean to a sober, industrious working inah—not a picture-book drunkard—after his hoUrs of work. It puts hint For the moment of his relaxations oil an equality with kings arid plutocrats. “LIFE NEEDS SHORTENING.” “It is no Use to say that tobacco shortens his life. Let it. It needs shortening. It is no use to shy that beer sogs his oesophagus and loosens his motor muscles. Let it do so. He is better off with loose ihoter muscles and a soggy 'oesophagus and a mug Of ale beside him in the cheerless discontent of an activity that knows only the work c'f life and nothing of its coihforts “Meantime it is well for the British

people to be warned. If they do not strangle in its .Cradle the snake of prohibition, then the country will be given over in its due time to the regime of th.e fanatic, the informer, and, the tyrant, shell as we have in North America even now.”