"ALIEN'S" LETTER FROM ENGLAND.

Otago Witness, Issue 3337, 27 February 1918, Page 50

"ALIEN'S" LETTER FROM ENGLAND.

(Specially Written for the Ladies' Page.) December 10. ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS. A number of letters from Witness correspondents, received this week by mail, that bears the New Zealand post-mark of September 17, 24, and 26, show how delayed sometimes the boats are —the triumphant boats that get through !—that bring | to our island news from the friends afar, and good food for the 'national cupboard, which, % month by month, grows a little nearer * to the condition of old Mother Hubbard's. Since the early 'days of Britain, when our painted or skin-clad ancestors fought invaders to defend the rights which generations of fighters have handed down to us (we proud and stubborn descendants of a proud and stubborn race), we have not realised so much as now how tremendous a thing it is to have become the greatest nation in history, and to have mastered the seas that were the pathways of our aggressors, and even now to hold them open in greater part, despite the subtlety of the enemy and the attacks beneath the waves. We do not realise all it means, not a fraction of I what it means, that our letters get through I at all, that our ships get through as often I as they do. For if the seas were closed j where should we be, you of the dominions I as well as we of Britain? You would j be as isolated as Ave. Longer in starving, I but soon very' poor, for with no world ' commerce where would be your pros-J perity? With a defeated navy, where your security? Wo, in the front trenchesT' would be the first of the Empire's victims. Then you. So it is with patriotic gratitude, as well as with pride, that we acknowledge our indebtedness to those that go down to the sea in ships—a sea more terrible and uncertain than Nature made it; a trap set by deadly hate for the brave. These letters that lie on my, desk, and which I answer "in the dimsies" of a December afternoon, mean more than messages from one friend to another, and one country to another: they mean that men are dying every day, and suffering every hour that we may keep the seas. Those sad and sullen seas that moan around the coast, and which, lifting my eyes, I see

] toss heavily in dun, colourless waves j fretting against the -burden of-, the blackfunnelled craft on its bosom, echoing sullenly to cannon not.its own. "A Reader of Many Years" .writes: "You have written well and strongly on various aspecta of the war, but it has struck me lately that you have not dealt much, if at all, with the octopus grip that the liquor trade has on England. To me, as to thousands of others here, it appears awful and humiliating that the heart of the Empire is so much in the grasp of the 'Beerage' that the drastic action taken against strong drink by our Allies; cannot bo follrfwed by Britain ,• that in spite of all the talk about shortage of food', and the great need for economy and efficiency, drink and drunkenness and their direful consequences prevail." It has not occurred to me to write about the drink evil, because my letter is supposed to be a chatty letter concerning the events of the day, and in no sense a party or partisan representation—rather a„ presentment of the social conditions of the hour. And to be honest, I have not seen this awful evil of drink and drunkenness laid to the charge of the "heart of our Empire." To begin with, there is not a move cosmopolitan community than the '■-;• Heart of the Empire on the face of the globe, and all its sins must not be attributed to Englishmen. And. that England during these direful years of the war is a drunken England is a lie which can only be attributed to her enemies or Temperance (so called) faddists. . Aa a matter of fact, nurses in the hospitals and officers will tell you that their chief trouble with cases of drunkenness and "dope" has been with men from some of the dominions, and from the countries where whisky is the beverage. Comparisons are odious, especially odious, as whisky and beer drinkers, not only of Britain, but of the whole Empire, have been among the bravest of our heroes. Do not mistake me. I am not advocating drink, nor defending it. I regard the drunkard; not as a vile being, but as a sick being, ill as the insane are ill, wanting that great day when science shall have discovered how to -heal them. There are more souldestroying vices than drink, and about which many reformers are silent even—the evil that hands down, the disease, that makes drunkards, and epileptics, and consumptives, and maniacs. The letter I have referred to opens up a wide field of discussion not suitable here. But briefly to 'touch upon the .drink question in England. In my first years in London I was interested in .."Darkest England," where my father had spent the. early years of his manhood as a city missionary in the -Earl of Shaftesbury's Missions. Thje tales he told me of Seven Dials, and St.'Giles, and other then famous East End slums, surpassed the stories of Dickens. So that when I came I was more desirous of visiting the East End (that vast world south side of the Thames which few sight-seers of London know) than the West End. Dr Barnardo and others showed me much that I wanted see. But even then the. old horrors had. for the most part, been swept away. The rnis"sionaries could do their work without the conduct of the nolice. The "Tom-all* Alones" were few. But the gin-palaces' flamed by night at the "reformed" street corners. Yet, I saw nothing worse or more terrible than I had seen in Little Bourke street one night in Melbourne, when, under the protection of a policeman in plain clothes, I "did" the opium slums for the Gftago Witness; nor anything ' worse at midnight in Piccadilly. Every city, large or email, has its scum. Bad conditions and ill-paid labour was. the cause of much of the drink. During the last 20 years the old, lurid, reeking, pestilent slums of London have almost entirely gone. Wide streets run through these Tom-all-Alones sprinkled with "Board Schools; but the class of people, the greater nortion of them the undesirables of other nations,, "herd" wherever they go; dirty and .shiftless, they make a'elum, and would convert a palace into a pig-sty. The flaunting gin-palaces that flared at almost every corner of mean streets have been much less evident since the war. The grip that the liquor trade had on England has been very greatly loosened. Judging from what I .can see, England was never more sober than now. The Drink Bills in no way represent the amount of alcohol consumed —Is -a quart is charged for what represents about 2d worth of the pre-war strength of thei beer, and however uig the fortunes which the '.'Beerage" is making, the drink itself is ■ very mild stuff, not stronger than herbal beer, and unless a man drank more quarts of it than the limited supplies make possible, a state of intoxication would take long to reach. It appears to me to be a wise measure of the Government not to deny the working man altogether of what he regards as his national beverage. The old stock of Britons were reared on ale, the strength of which is in no way to be compared with the- present mild brew, and in. a measure the Englishman regards his ale as his right. But although the Government has not denied alcohol altogether, it is so

diluted and so high in price, so restricted in output, and the hours of obtaining it (when attainable) so few and far between that intoxication is now very rare, and cases of "drunkenness" at the police courts fewer and fewer. Spirit-selling is only possible between 12 o'clock and halfpast 2 for the purchaser to take away, and not at all from midday Friday till Monday, and by law the spirits are not half their previous strength, and four or five times the pre-war prices, and quite unobtainable in most quarters at that. So that in another way drastic measures have been taken to reduce the consumption of strong drink. The freedom of purchase has been left within rigorously-re-stricted hours to the will of the individual ■ —and the alcohol itself not forthcoming. But whoever charges the workers of Britain at the present time with "inefficiency" through drink is either misinformed or makes a deliberate misstatement. It is not a drunken England that is toiling from daylight to dusk, and from dark till dawn. Most of the men, drunkards'among them, are fighting and nobly suffering in France, or learning to be soldiers under military discipline in this great camp of all England. Never has the efficiency of men and women so triumphantly proved itself, nor their devotion to a high purpose. Think of what is being done: the millions of shells, the millions of men fed and clothed across the Channel, the million's of cargoes, carted and packed and despatched; all day long, all night long, the hammers wielded, the risks taken among explosives, men and women feeding and tending the thousands of goods trains; men and women building the ships;, men and women building the " aeroplanes,' making the soldiers' clothes, making their boots, making their guns — old men and women who have earned their, rest-time, beginning to labour all oyer'again filling the vacant places of the young. I wish the detractors of - these workers had to take" their place, and suffer, their weariness-and live their anxieties by day and by night. None but enemies Avould charge them with inefficiency or drunkenness. Every home and village and community has its- failures j but if we lose this war it will pot be the masses of Britain who will- be to blame for selfindulgence of body or spirit. -And the Germans know it. Be reassured, whoever charges England as a whole with either drunkenness or inefficiency at this'hour of. the Empire's peril when it is a crime to be inactive, errs. The food-hogs ■ and profiteers are a greater peril to the nation. But. despite the fortunes which the distillers and breweT-profiteers may make on their very mild brew, the "shortage" of wines and beers and spirits is as much a fact as the shortage of tea. But while hundreds of thousands of people- have followed the King's example and closed their cellars till the end of the war, there are a small minority of drink-hogs who .are buying up at. monstrous prices what spirits there are on the market. Pity such as these should reap the .benefit of the fighting and working of the great majority. Mary.—l think my • recent letters will have -answered your question re the food shortage, which every day becomes more apparent, and although the West End shops appear to be stocked with every conceivable luxury at prices which ignore the" Food Controller's fixing, most of theses goods were probably stored in the great' vaults of the'shops before the U. boats steadily and surely cut down supplies. When the warehouses and cold storages have been deDleted of their present stocks of luxury and tinned goods (the prices of which have more than doubled alreadv) th*e moneyed, classes of purchasers will doubtless begin to feel the pinch as well as the masses. One shop presents a bare and meagre appearance, and the next is stocked with all the dainties and luxuries imaginable; and just now, with a view to the Christmas trade, the toy bazaars and other fascinations would eive the stranger the impression that everything imaginable was inexhaustible. But the long queues of waiting women and children outside the grocery stores deny this impression of over-abundance; or try to oMain sl6 of butter and the same of tea, and you will find that a quarter of that is a favour or unusual hick. The tea shortage is a universal calamity. Thousands can let the alcoholic beverages go pining; but millions pine for their tea, for it is the most all-round refreshing stimulate to brain and nerves that there is, taken in and properly made. The army is, of course, supplied first and without stint, and it does one good to hear the soldiers tell of what those steaming hot cups of tea mean to them after exhaustive fighting and the miseries of the trenches, and in the camps also. I have watched the soldiers muster in the street outside their billet opposite for. their tea many times after their return from a route march or rifle practice on the bleak sandhills. Pale with the cold and weariness, their faces illuminate at the order "Fall in for tea!" And while it is being clipped by the bucketful steaming hot from the boiler of the camp kitchen, ■ jugging away in the street the men play a tattoo on their tin pannicans—an impatient tattoo of anticipation. * The new sugar cards were distributed this morning to be filled up. As I previously pointed out, the original sugar 'cards entered each person at the address when the card was filled in at that address. Any members leaving the address then given and the locality of the grocer with whom one was registered could not obtain sugar. The new cards are made out separately in the naut* of each nidi vidual or child, and hold good wherever that person may be, We shall get "fixed" by-the time the war is over! The 12in and 14in high boots are now forbidden to women and girls as taking too much leather to produce. But, unless exquisitely . made and perfectly fitting, they are not comfortable. Nor arc they generally worn, nine out of \Q women preferring boots with cloth tops or shoes •with gaiters. An order to still further

save leather and vban high heels would hit women more generally. x Almost every woman wears high heels, particularly on her dress shoes and evening slippers. The Food Controller says that living should be cheaper than it was a few months ago, but every housekeeper knows that it is not. When after great labour Lord Rhondda fixes the prices in any line —tea and coffee, for example,—-all the cheaper samples immediately disappear from the shops, and only the whole at outside prices is obtainable. The cheap teas have all mysteriously changed info 4s teas (except in quality); the cheaper coffee as mysteriously been sold out. The controlled price cheese (le 8d) and bacon (is lOd) is all " done" and transformed "best quality," except in-flavour. Two shillings and fourpence and 2s 6d is the usual for bacon, and Is 9d and 2s for cheese. The butchers still ignore" the order to price their meat, and • charge whatever they imagine that their customers will pay. Nothing will- compel a fair distribution--- except rationing". The rich buy what they like; the poor in purse go without much that they need. To investigate the charges of Mr Ben Tillet as to v the wastage of food at the docks, Lord Rhondda accompanied Mr Tillett on a visit of inspection, and maKes the reassuring statement that waste is "ancient history," and that much of the food that rotted in the ships had gone bad before arrival—especially the fish, — owing to the delay caused by sheltering on the way from the U .boats.