WHAT ENGLAND WILL NOT STAND

Evening Star, Issue 18119, 8 November 1922, Page 9

WHAT ENGLAND WILL NOT STAND

A leader in the .London ‘Daily Mail’ says : —“ Tlio evidence of dispassionate American witnesses ns to the results of ‘Pussyfoot’ methods in tho United States does not altogether support the sanguine view that the remedy for poverty ana all human evils is to put mankind into a legal strait-waistcoat. On tho moral side, Americans have described theq effect of Prohibition ns producing a ‘ nation of hypocrites.” It sounds a strong phrase, but there is the undisputed fact that tho United States Government (which enforces Prohibition on dry land) soils liqnor cheap in the ships which it works and owns. The Executive Committee of tho American Federation of Labor has condemned Prohibition as ‘ a social and moral failure, and a dangerous breeder of discontent and contempt for the law.’ "Thus, judged by its moral effects, Prohibition does not seem to have given precisely that ‘uplift ’ which was expected of it. On the fiscal side, according to American authorities, it has raised American taxes by £250,(XX),000 a year. It has driven a largo section of the American people to resort to tho devices known ns ‘bootlegging,’ smuggling, and manufacturing various deleterious mixtures such as ‘moonshine whisky,’ ‘synthetic whisky,’ ‘h.oosh,’ and ‘fire-water’; ami tho Prohibitionists, to meet this, have organised a great and costly system of informers and spies. On the physical side there in the fact that in the first fourteen days of tho present year 103 persons died from alcoholic poisoning in one American State.

11 In _ short, the lesson of tlio United States is that freedom and temperance are better than constraint and Prohibition, against which, bo long as men are men, human beings will always rebel.” _ What more need bo said ! Vote Continuance.—[Advt.]