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Show -1M' WHAT WE WOULD DO IN ENGLAND. If the editor of the Standard were King George, or Premier Asquith or Genera Kitchener he would demand the closing without delay of every liquor li-quor shop n the British Isles Russia slopped the traffic In vodka at the opening of the war, and the improvement im-provement in the welfare of the people which followed made Russia stronger In war time than In peace. The efficiency effi-ciency of the workmen was Increased 50 per cent. France abolished absinthe and the French nation responded as though stimulated bv nourishing spiritual food. Drunkenness at the shipyards and ordnance works has so handicapped the military preparations of Great Britain as to become a national weakness. weak-ness. There may be some question In time6 of peace as to the degree to which personal rights can be encroached en-croached on without breaking down that individuality so necessary to the higher development of real liberty, and also some doubt as to the fairness of a measure which destroys property, for the benefit of the whole, without compensating the owners, but in a great ordeal such as Great Britain Is facing, those objections stand as naughi as against the results to be attained. Were we master of the situation, and laboring for the cause of the allies, al-lies, the decree forbidding the sale of intoxicating liquor would be Issued peremptorily per-emptorily and enforced with military severity The Englishman in the factory fac-tory would be Impressed with the idea that he owed quite as much to his country as the man who went to the front; that the same sacriflceB were expected from him as from the volunteer volun-teer who shouldered a gun and entered en-tered the tronches, and the fellow who disregarded that demand and that discipline dis-cipline by drinking and rendering himself him-self less efficient than a sober man would be treated as disloyal and brought to a realization of his offending offend-ing by measures sufficiently harsh to I strike home. I The man who, in the security of his I home town, far removed from the horrors hor-rors of the battlefield, fails in a crisis to give to his country the best that is In him, is dead to patriotism and certainly indifferent to his own future and that of his posterity, and needs arousing with a prod long enough to penetrate to a sensitive part of his moral and physloal makeup. |
