alling infant mortality which destroys in many districts a fifth of
the child life in the first year.... It lowers the vitality and makes
the tissues more susceptible to attacks by the germs of disease, and
thus greatly increases the deathrate.... It multiplies coffins and
empties cradles.... Were this one monopoly abolished {109} and the
people delivered from the State-licensed temptations which are for ever
inviting them to their ruin, almost all workhouses and jails would be
closed and the nation delivered from the burden of pauperism and crime
which weighs so heavily upon it. Yet the nation in the time of its
greatest peril spends L180,000,000 a year upon the drink-traffic. This
is the price which it pays for the lowering of its own vitality and for
the weakening of its striking power. A government which connives at
that cannot be a government that is waging war really in earnest.
Shipping, food, coals, the railways, roads, and a host of men are in
great measure sacrificed to a trade which weakens the nation in face of
the enemy.

The favourite argument in support of the liquor trade is the argument
that upholds the liberty of the subject. In a free country people must
be free to destroy themselves if they so wish, that others may be free
to use alcohol {110} without abusing it. If we are to aim at freedom,
let us have a freedom worth while. At present the nation is not free
to control or eliminate the greatest peril in our midst. We are
entrusted with the administration of our schools and roads and gas and
poor-rates, and we elect men who control these. But we elect nobody
who controls alcohol. We have as citizens no say as to whether the
grocer in the village will get a licence to corrupt our family life
with alcohol, or whether the poor places be crowded with public-houses.
That is in the hands of justices, and justices are created by a
mysterious power behind politics. In a free country this power of
planting down places for the sale of alcohol independently of the will
of the people is an anachronism by which the poor are enslaved. When
we speak of freedom let us consider this freedom--freedom for the
children of the poor to grow up untempted. Let us remember that the
race has now to depend mainly upon {111} the poor for its continuation
and for its virility. A nation that will doom the rising generation to
the atmosphere of gin and whisky round its cradles, seals its own doom.
The children brou