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Show INTEMPERANCE. It is interesting to ovserve how the economic aspect of Intemperance is coming to be the controlling one in its treatment. The merchant or manufacturer manu-facturer or transportation manager does 'not argue that the drinking of liquor to excess is a moral wrong. He simply says that ho. cannot afford to have a clerk or an engineer or a motor-man motor-man who is liable to get drunk, a-ncl thereby disarrange hi3 business, blow up his mill or involve his company in a disaster which may cost it tens of thousands of dollars in damages for killing or. injuring passengers.- The same principle is coming to be applied in military life. A general may hold any personal views which he chooses as to the drinking of wine, but the experience of every army, in whatever what-ever part of the world the-.test is. applied, ap-plied, show.;(that if.j.soldiers are men who wiir get drunk, the efficiency of the organization is terribly impaired. Some very striking figures bearing on this point have been compiled from the records of the British forces in India during the past two years. The admissions ad-missions into hospitals were 50 per cent greater among those who drank liquor than among those who did not, while the convictions for all sorts of offences were almost nine times as many among the non-abstainers as among the abstainers. ab-stainers. There is an Army Temperance association asso-ciation in England which seeks to diminish di-minish intemperance among the soldiers, sol-diers, both by discouraging the practice prac-tice of drinking liquor and by removing remov-ing the temptations to indulgence. Lord Roberts presided at a recent meeting of thf n qnr'i n t i in ' pniinpil ond nnnitracr. ing reports of the progress of its work were made. During the Tirah campaign cam-paign nearly 2,000 of t the troops ' remained re-mained abstainers, to their great advantage ad-vantage as a part of the army. One feature of the association's work is the provision of ample opportunity for the men to get non-alcoholic drinks during the manoeuvres at home. The military authorities have become warm supporters of all such efforts to restrict drunkenness, if for no other reason, I because they have found that a British Brit-ish army which keeps sober is a much better fighting machine than one which gets drunk. |