THE BETTER OLE.

White Ribbon, Volume 35, Issue 415, 18 February 1930, Page 1

THE BETTER OLE.

Many wiil remember Bairnsfath* r's famous picture, “If you knows a better 'ole go to ii." And when we read and hear of people who think prohibition in the U.S.A. is a failure, we always feel inclined to say, “If you knows a better way, go for it." The crying National evil of the L.quoi Tratfic has come down to us from the distant past. It is hero, ruining the child; blighting the home; causing disease, unemployment and financial distress; a fruitful cause of poverty, crime and inefficiency. What are we to do? Allow it to continue its ravages unchecked? Regulation was first tried. But how can you regulate a tradie which persistently refuses to be regulated; which breaks every law r and regulation that has ever been made. Mr. Brian. President of the Indiana State University, says: “I challenge any and every enemy of prohibition to name one restricted liquor law anywhere of any time which the liquor forces have obeyed. We have tried out every milder restriction, every weaker device. We had a law that liquor must not be sold to known drunkards. Was that law r obeyed 0 It was not. We tried to protect our youth by forbidding the sale of liquor

to minors. Did the saloons obey that? They did not. We prohibited the sale of liquor on election days, and Sundays, and after eleven o'clock at night. Were any of these laws obeyed? They were not. The people, by overwhelming majorities voted their own States dry, or their counties or wards. Did the liquor forces ever respect the will of the people in such cases. Never. They poured in the liquor by every bootlegging device, and then sought to break down the restrictive law by the living claim that they sold more liquor in the dry territory than when they had open saloons. “Who, in the face of a hundred years of such law defiance can believe that retreat from Prohibition to some milder law will give us a law that the liquor forces will obey. “1 ask you, »o tell us what law r the liquor forces have ever obeyed. If we cannot be shown a better line than we have now. we are going to fight here.” Canada is trying State Control, but the result bids fair to be not the State controlling the Trade, but the Trade controlling the State. The Editor of “The Globe,” a leading Toronto paper, gave it as his opinion that Government Control does not n ake for real temperance. He says liquor consumption in Ontario has doubled in two under State

Control; that drunken motorisis have multiplied by ten, while cars doubled; that accidents due to drunken drivers have increased enormously; that industrial accidents have increased 7 per cent, faster than payrolls; that the small bootlegger has multiplied! that Government Control lias not henefitted young p ople. The United States has outlawed the liquor tratfic, but Canada has made it respectable. The consumption of spirits in Canada rose from 231 gallons per capita in 1922 to 425 gallons per capita in 1928; whiie the consumption of malt liquor during the same period rose from 3.07 gallons to *1.07 gallons per capita. Roughly speaking, the consumption of both spirits and malt liquors lies doubled in six years under State Control. Sweden tried Gotherburg system —an attempt to curtail the sales of liquor—now it has the Bratt system —an attempt to curtail the number of drinkers. Both have been failures. Sweden is now proposing “very high license, restrictions as to number of bars, hours of sale, age limits, all of w r hich will fail while the liquor traffic smiles approval. The United States is giving prohibition a trial. We have shown that regulation fails to regulate, that State Control increases the sale

and consumption of liquor. What about prohibition? Mabel Walker Willebrandt, for eight years Assist' ant Attorney-General of U.S.A. and in charge of enforcement of prohibition, says, that when prohibition became law the U.S.A. had 507 distilleries with an annual output of 1,144,000,000 quarts of distilled liquor. There were 1,217 breweries with an output of hundreds of millions of gallons of beer, and there were 178,000 saloons. In addition, there were thousands of speakeasies, and the bootleggers were in ail parts of the country. Now bootleggers and speak-easies are still with us, but their number has not increased, more probably it has decreased. But, distilleries and saloons, are gone. Every year the enforcement is easier, as youths grow up without any knowledge of the saloon. There are a million college students who never saw a saloon; four million high school students who do not know what it looks like, as w’ell as forty million children who only know w'hat they have been told about a saloon. Professor Davis, of Yale, said: ‘'Prohibition is an effort to remove certain grosser forms of harmful influences from our environment. It took 100 years to arouse a moral conscience against the saloon, it will be impossible to judge the effect of the prohibition legislation for 50 years. Prohibition is easier to enforce than regulation, and when enforced will be successful in putting a stop to the evils of strong drink. One writer sums up the position as follows: “The liquor trade never obeyed any law; high license, low license, early closing or no license. It is not at all strange that it does not obey prohibition laws. It will not obey any law’ that may be made to limit It in future. Increase the alcoholic content of beverages and the liquor trade will go beyond it. Allow the sale of beer and wines, and the trade will sell distilled liquors. All experience for years shows that the liquor trade will not obey any limit of law'. Prohibition is more easily and better enforced than any laws that have been made to regulate the liquor trade in the past.”