"FOLLOW THE KING!"

Evening Star, Issue 15906, 11 September 1915, Page 9

"FOLLOW THE KING!"

[Published by Arrangement.] Every citizen is urged to sign THE PATRIOTIC PLEDGE : " In order that I may be of the greatest service to my Country, and carry out the wishes of the King at this time of national peril, I promise until the end of the war to abstain from all intoxicants (except when such are ordered by a doctor), and to encourage others to do the same." (Signed) ***# * * * Lord Curzon on Alcohol.—" The drink evil is a leper spot on the surface of the nation, a moral canker eating into the vitality of our people, and producing effects which do not die with the vear, or the life, or even with the generation, but which will be reproduced from year to year from generation to generation in a terrible portentous legacv of poverty, misery, and crime." * * * ~,* * * * Editors and Liquor.—Edward Box is one of the youngest editors in America, and he controls the magazine with the largest circulation in the United States. In a recent issue he said :—" I was about 16 years old when I began attending public dinners as a newspaper reporter. As I sat down to the first public dinner I ever attended I turned down all the wine glasses set before my plate, and this 1 have followed ever since. Then as I looked around and came to know more of people and things, I found that the most successful men in America are those who never lift a wine glass to* their lips. I had the curiosity to personally inquire into it, and of 28 of the leading business men in the country whose names I selected at random, 22 never touch wine of anv sort. Surely there was some reason for this! And when I saw that these were the men whose opinions in great business matters were accepted by the leading concerns of the world, I concluded that their judgment in the use of liquor would satisfy me." ******* A Worse Thing Than the Liquor Traffic. —At the sixteenth National Convention of the Anti-saloon League of America, which was held' in Atlantic City, N.J., in July, Dr A. C. Bane, in an able address, said: " Alcoholic liquor is recognised by all nations as the greatest curse in civilisation. No good word can be said for it; it is degenerating, debasing, debauching, and destroying the race. Tiie liquor traffic creates drunkards, criminals, paupers, profligates, the insane, mental imbeciles, and orphan children; it destroys character, happiness, efficiency, health, and life; it debauches individuals, business, legislatures, executives, and courts. There is but one thing- in America worse than the liquor traffic, and that is the public sentiment that tolerates it." ******* King Alcohol Loses Territory.—Kaiser Wilhelm is not so badlv off, in the loss of his colonial possessions, as is King Alcohol, who is rinding every month that the "dries" have taken possession of territory to which he is supposed to have an inalienable right. The Associated Press canvass of liquor legislation for the year- discloses the fact that with' 19 States already "dry," and three others about to become so, King Alcohol has been driven out of a broad belt which stretches from the north-west on the Pacific to the south-east on the Atlantic. Thus far King Alcohol has ceded rural rather than urban territory to the " dries." It is evident from this that the last strongholds of King Alcohol will be our great cities; there he is still apparently as strongly entrenched as ever. But so rapidly have . the temperance allies mobilised against Jiim in the last 20 years that within less time than that ahead we shall see him driven into both. oceans, where he belongs.—American exchange.