COST OF PROHIBITION.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VII, Issue 555, 2 April 1913, Page 2

COST OF PROHIBITION.

The secretary of the Licensed Victuallers' Association and "No-License Secretary" are as likely to agree as to how much national prohibition would cost the country as they are as to how much or how little it would benefit the people. But it is due to the Financial News, which is quoted with approval by one of and denounced in unmeasured terms by the other, to say that when it put the cost of excluding liquor from the dominion at two millions a year it did not imply that the loss of Customs and Excise revenue would run into this amount.' As a matter of fact, the liquor trade contributed only £822,384 to the revenue in 1911, apart from the £43,843 it paid by way of license fees, and probably as the prohibitionists contend, this amount would be more than made up by the greater sobriety of the people and the decrease of crime. But the Financial News, arguing from its own point of view, was entitled to take into account the loss of wages and of capital that would follow upon the total abolition of the trade. This, it may be presumed, is what it actually did, and though the loss would not be a recurring one it might represent the gross cost of the first year of national prohibition. What would happen afterwards is a question to which "only experience can return a conclusive answer.