STATE CONTROL OF THE LIQUOR TRAFFIC.

White Ribbon, Volume 32, Issue 372, 18 June 1926, Page 4

STATE CONTROL OF THE LIQUOR TRAFFIC.

(Faper by Miss Jessie Mackay, at Convention (Continued.) ENGLISH AND RUSSIAN EXPERIMENTS.

Britain made her single bid for Stale Control in the Carlisle experiment, on which later Parliaments have been singularly reticent, and which they absolutely refuse to extend.

Carlisle was a quiet little town of fifty thousand inhabitants in 1914. with the usual English drinking rate for its size. In November, 1915, Carlisle was Hooded with ten to twelve thousand navvies for munition work. Two to four thousand more were quartered at Gretna, Awnan. and some hamlets, all across the Scottish border, and all making Carlisle their week-end drinking place. Crowded past its limits, bare of up-to-date recreations, and left to its own small nolice force for protection and order, Carlisle soon became a Bedlam. For eight months the authorities strove to enforce the war-

time restrictions on liquor, hut .‘h number and violence of the drunken host defied ull order. At last the Central Control (of liquor) Board decided to buy up all the licenses in the Carlisle-Awnan area, and regulate the trade itself. Only two large hotels in Carlisle remained out of Board control. The scheme was adopted in June. 191«, but purchase and re-fitting took several months to effect.

Nevertlu less Board Control transformed Carlisle, managers on *a fixed salary, with a large bonus on food sold, carried out many reforms. Grocer’s licenses were abolished, temperance Cafes opened, coffee carts started Tor night workers, and seventy houses \ ere closed; “off consumption was forbidden in most houses, purchase of spirits forbidden to minors, Sunday sale of spirits prohibited (to get into line with Scottish law) and beer brought down to war-time strength. These and the war restrictions naturally produced effect, though drunkenness and disorder were very obvious still. The story of Carlisle’s first year under Board Control has been told ili\ ersely and at length by two Wesleyan minister*. The Rev. Wilson Stuart, Birmingham, described the failures of the prescribed re-

forms and orgies he had witness during two visits. His pamphlet frankly indicted tin* Control Board for bad faith and pushing sales of

liquor without food. The Rev. G. Bramwell Evans, resident in Carlisle, defended the Board's actions during the difficult time of transition. It is useless now to dwell on the details of one troubled war year, and on the circumstances surrounding a change so drastic. It hardly matters now on what date the navvies were draft-

ed away, or when munition girls took their place.

What concerns us is the present state of Carlisle, restored to tranquillity, but transferred, on the dissolution of the Central Board, to the control of the Home Office. Could the operation of State Control in this sleepy little English town, inland and industrial, justify the sky rending laudations of liquor advocates, anxious to claim at b*ast on State Control success, and ho delay the onward march of Prohibition.

Fndoubtedly, Carlisle, like all publicly controlled areas, has not failed to make considerable revenue tor its size. The authorities dared not publish the enormous profits of the first year. Later balance sheets haw* proved that some one is still handsomely keeping up sales. As there is no greater show of drunkenness than in other towns of like size and character, the natural inference is that the respectable bars have widened the area of production. License, broadly speaking, stands for man’s drinking; State Control, invariabl> for family drinking. Young l**ople meet alcohol in the restaurants and acquire the taste.

How liquor is distributed in Carlisle’s State bars (there are several ordinary hotels there) is only known to the Home Office. Whatever virtues State Control may possess, they are not democratic virtues; it is of necessity a

bureacracy. But Carlisle’s inebriation statistics shatter the the fallacy that drinking has been reduced there. It has been shown that out of eighty-four boroughs including London, Carlisle, for its size, has the lowest number of licenses. So far so good. But out of seventy-eight of boroughs; including such busy centres as Leeds, Wigan, and Burton-on-Trent. Carlisle for its population has the most convictions for drunkenness.

I may hen* offer for what they are worth some personal impressions of a two day’s visit to Carlisle in April, 1922. The town was as orderly and quiet as others of its size I had met. Many people seemed unaware they were under a spi-cial dispensation. The Mayor, then absent, was favourable to the change, they said. Other leading men citizens consulted were uniformly favourable, including the Free Church Clergy, who remember-

ed the bad old days. The police were pleased with the new regime. But praise ceased when I got to bedrock with the temperance women of the town. They are still less satisfied, I read, to-day. The church deaconesses, they said, did not like the growing results of the women’s bars as touching young persons and young

mothers. The temperance women resented the impossibility of getting information regarding the distribution of liquor from huge lorries parading in the town. Still more, they resented the turning of a large private mansion into a State Hotel in a residential area which vainly protested against its proximity. These points also fretted the older Free Church ministers, otherwise friendly to State Control.

I read the end of the Carlisle experiment most clearly in the faces I .>aw in the women's liars at night, where neatly-dressed young mothers were taking their first lesson in beer drinking and chatting merrily. “Are the fathers minding the children?" I asked the manageress. “Their bars,” she snapped, and again in the face of this woman, sensitive to fathers? They’re in the men’s her position, and already crossing the border-line, I read the end of Carlisle. Though, in passing the men's bars, nothing orgy-like was to he noticed, how different was this Babel of confused tongues from the healthy, “cubby” noise of young men recreating on athletics and tea. The wild, excised eyes of the young woman fitted well with this. I know where England will find them on the day she needs them, and feel that the resolution passed by the oldest Temperance Society of the town in May, 1924. covers the truth;

“This Society, after seven years’ close observation of State Control in Carlisle, is of the opinion that it has proved a failure ... We are further of opinion that the system of separ-

ate bars has been instrumental in increasing drinking among women.” The incident of Carlisle, a town with half the population of Christchurch, has been magnified out of all prospective for Liquor's ends. We Prohibitionists are not well-advised to bring accusations against either the Central Control Board or the Home Office. It is difficult to suggest what other course was open to the Hoard at the time, nor what line of wordly wisdom would be safer than quietly marking time as the Home office is now r doing. It may be granted that Carlisle is as yet outwardly respectable, or was so four years ago; it cannot be denied, on the other hand, that it has not headed England towards the right solution of the drink problem. Were Carlisle even in the van of sober boroughs, which it is not, State Control in the sleepy little Cumbrian town is neither here nci there, but State Control in Liverpool is unthinkable. If the Government attempted to extend tlie experiment, it knows that it would bring down more obloquy on itself than any Government dare face at such a critical moment. If it frankly confessed Carlisle a failure and reverted to License, it would invite the opening of a flood-gate of Prohibition energy just as infuriating to a drinking proletariat already suspected of being revolutionary. As long as Carlisle remains, it is the centre round which worthy clerics and well-intentiored society ladies blow off hopeful, futile steam without offending anybody. A really effective policy of liquor reform can well afford to let Carlisle go on slowly withering into disrepute. It is a far cry from Carlisle to Moscow. Twelve years ago Russia was at the height of her dance of death, contingent on the Government having assumed the monopoly of making and selling vodka in 1895. Here was another futile “reform,” blessed by the Church, lambs! by fashionable ladies, and immediately a source of immense revenue to a Government already corrupt and undutiful. Soon the appetite of the people and the cupidity of the State took complete command. The priests had to leave off preaching temperance; the teachers liad to leave off teaching it, and the reformers were bludgeoned into leaving off criticis-

ing the monopoly. With every restriction on sale loosened, every artifice and attraction provided to enhance business, a muzzled Press, a corrupt judiciary, and a vampire Government, Russia had achieved one of the most appalling liquor debacle® in history. No wonder Europe went down before Asia in the first set encounter between East and West. State Control played it's, full part in Russia’s fall at Port Arthur. Suffice it to say, that the Czar stopped the monopoly on the outbreak of war, and that last year the Bolshevik Government, under financial pressure restored it. Vodka, will ao for the Soviet what Kolchak. Denikin, and W ran gel failed to do.

East and West clashed again in that shadowed page of history, our fifty years of State Control in India before the new constitution was granted. It was about 1 874 that the British Government began distilling a certain crude, fiery spirit for the natives, who were very unwilling to buy It. It was not sold to British soldiers. Licenses were sold to the highest bidders, and the trade thus forced on a helpless, weak and poverty-ridden people, brought us large revenues at last, as drunkenness spread among a race already in the clutch of vices other than drink. In 1909-1910, the Indian famine year—drink and drugs brought in a revenue of £6,717,000. This w r as not the least indictment brought against us by Gandhi and the Nationalist party. The Government is trying now to discourage liquor selling to the native, hut tho past cannot Is* undone. We at least tried to be more just to the Maoris.