THE MODERATE LEAGUE.

Cromwell Argus, Volume L, Issue 2646, 27 October 1919, Page 5

THE MODERATE LEAGUE.

TO THE EDITOR. SiK.--M.Ty I crave space in your paper to comment upon several points raised by Mr Douglas, organiser for the Moderate League, at his meeting in Cromwell last Wednesday night Mr Douglas, evidently disappointed with his small audience, complained that the Prohibition Party were preventing their supporters attending his meetings. This complaint does not apply to this district as I myself made a special trip to Clyde to ensure the attendance of some of our supporters at his meeting there, and of his audience of 11 a fair proportion were Prohibitionists. Mr Douglas knew they were too ; ask him ! One could not but be struck with the immoderate language of this exponent of “moderation.” Any prohibition campaigner would immediately recognise his tactics as belonging peculiarly to “ the trade,” and one is forced to the conclusion-—in spite of protestations to the contrary—that the “mantle of the trade” has fallen upon the shoulders of this prophet of the “Moderate League.” Mr Douglas asks ; “If alcohol is so detrimental to man that its use in alcoholic beverages has to be prohibited, why did the Almighty create it !” The Almighty never created it, any more than he created T.N.T., or the Gormans poison gas. You may take corn and pile it up to heaven, and let it rot to earth, and you will never find whisky in the process of rotting. You may leave grapes until the blue mould has eaten them up, and alcoholic wine will not appear in the process of decay, Mechanical force has to be used and an unnatural kind of fermentation set up before alcohol mam' fests itself. It may as well be said that because God made iron ore that he created bayonets and butchers knives. Mr Douglas based his main argument in favor of State Purchase and Control on the result of the British Government’s purchase and control of the public-houses in Carlisle, a munition centre during the war, but bis figures were so hopelessly inaccurate that it would be a waste of space to traverse them here, further than to note that, fo) a start, he didn’t even get within forty-four thousand of the correct pre-war population of Carlisle. He, of course, failed to tell us that the primary cause of the decrease in the number of convictions for drunkenness in Carlisle in 1917, and the first quarter of 1918, was the prohibition of the sale of spirits on Saturday, the enforcement of Sunday closing, and the reduction of the licensed premises in the city from 1 19 in 71, These restrictions would have been enforced without State Purchase, as in fact they were in other localities, and with results equal to, if not surpassing, those obtained in Carlisle. Carlisle, the most rigorously “controlled” area in the Tinted Kingdom, showed only the same reduction in ‘'drink” figures, namely 75 per cent., as the rest of the Kingdom for the period under review.—l am, etc. A. L. WITHE POL’D, Local Organiser, Prohibition Campaign.