The Fiddlers; Drink in the Witness Box :: The Price the Empire Pays

The Price the Empire Pays

It is a bitter irony that while the men of the Empire have come to France to fight the enemy of mankind, this foe within our gates has struck a blow at the British Empire that generations will not heal. How many Empire men this private trade has slain we do not know, but we know beyond all challenge that it has weakened the bonds that bind our Dominions to the Motherland. This trade that throttles us at home can pull the Empire down, and it has started well. It has struck its blow at Canada.

Let us look at the plain facts which in other days than these would have caused a storm of anger that Parliament could not have ignored. Canada has followed the King; arming herself with her full powers, flinging herself upon her enemies with her utmost strength, she has swept drink out of Canada almost from sea to sea. But even before she did this Canada saw that alcohol must go from her camps if her men were to be fit to fight for England, and long before the Prohibition wave swept across the country, the Canadian Government removed all alcohol from the training camps. It was the deliberate choice of a Government and its people, and from that day to this there has been no reason for regret.

So the young manhood of Canada, rallying to the flag, was guarded from alcohol. She poured out her men in hundreds of thousands; they came to us from Prohibition camps; they came in Prohibition ships, and even here this trade that has us in its grip was not allowed at first in the Canadian camps; the only condition that Canada made—a condition implied but clearly understood—was properly regarded and obeyed.

We respected the desire of Canada, and kept her soldiers free from drink in their own camps. But a soldier cannot keep in camp, and in the villages around the Drink Trade waits in every street. The military authorities were willing for the Canadian Government to have their way inside the camps, but drink was free outside, and in these public-houses there was sown the seed that may one day break this Empire. The Drink Trade was so rampant outside the Canadian camps that Prohibition inside was almost in vain. We had to decide between breaking the word of the Canadian Government to its people or dealing with this trade as Canada herself has done; as Russia has done; as France and America are doing. It was the Empire or the drink traffic, and the drink traffic won, as it always wins with us.

It came about in October, down on Salisbury Plain. During one week-end a number of Canadian troops gave way to drinking in villages around the camps, and it was then that the grave decision was come to that the drink trade should be allowed to set up its horrible canteens in every Canadian camp. The change was made at the request of a British General, and we have the assurance of the Prime Minister of Canada that the approval of the Canadian Government was neither obtained nor asked. In handing the Canadian Army over to the drink canteens, in deliberately reversing the policy of the Canadian Government and its people, there was no consultation with Canada.

It is important to remember that this decision, fraught with tragic and far-reaching consequences for the Empire, was a pure and simple English act. We may imagine the Canadian view from the remark of a Canadian General, who said, “I know drink is a hindrance, but I can do very little, because in military circles in this country drunkenness is not considered a very serious offense.”

It would have been surprising if there had not poured in upon our Government a stream of protests, and from all parts of the Dominions they came. The Dominion of Canada, giving freely to the Motherland 450,000 boys and men, was moved to passionate indignation that England should scorn her love for them, should ignore the pleadings of their mothers and sisters, and should put in their way the temptations from which they were saved at home. Canada does not want our drink trade; she lives side by side with the United States, she sees that great country building up its future free from drink, and she sees America, splendid ally in war, as a mighty rival in peace.

And Canada is ready for the Reconstruction. She has followed the Prohibition lead of the United States, and already she has ceased to be a borrowing country. The very first year of Prohibition has seen this young Dominion, for the first time in her history, financially self-sustaining. Crime is disappearing; social gatherings are held in her gaols; she has set up vast munition workshops, and instead of borrowing money for her own support she has made hundreds of millions’ worth of munitions for which this country need not pay until the war is over, and then need never pay at all for the munitions the Canadians have used. Canada is in deadly earliest. She kept her men away from drink to make them fit; she has swept it away to make a clean country for those who go back.

And what is England’s contribution to this Imperial Reconstruction? We have scorned it all. The Prime Minister has said that this drink trade is so horrible that it is worth this horrible war to settle with it, yet we have sacrificed the love of Canada on our brewers’ altar. We can believe the Canadian who declares his profound conviction that but for this Canada would have sent us 100,000 more recruits; we can believe it is true that where responsible Canadians meet together in these days the talk is of how long the tie will last unbroken that binds the daughter to the Motherland. We can understand the passion that lies behind the resolutions that come to Downing Street from Nova Scotia; we know the depth of the yearning of those 64,000 mothers and wives of Toronto who signed that great petition to the Government of Canada begging it in the name of God to intervene.

We can understand it all; but let us call the witnesses, and let us see the price the Dominion pays for our quailing before this Kaiser’s trade.

Those Who Will Not Go Back

It is the great consolation of Canada that, though their sons may fall before this tempter’s trade in Britain, they will go back to a Canada free from drink. But some will never go back, and they are not on the Roll of Honour. They have been destroyed by the enemy within our gate, this trade that traps men on their way to France and digs their graves.

A young Canadian who had never tasted alcohol came from a Prohibition camp in Canada, came to England on a Prohibition ship, and was put in a camp with a drink canteen. He started drinking and contracted venereal disease. Ordered home as unfit, in fear and shame he sought a friend’s advice about the girl he was to marry. “You can never marry her,” said his friend, and that night in his hut the young Canadian blew out his brains.

Facts in possession of the Author

A young Canadian officer was sent home disgraced. Sodden with alcohol, he left the train and shot a railway clerk dead.

Facts in Montreal “Weekly Witness,” October 24, 1916

A Russian soldier in the Canadian forces, described as a clean, soldierly man, with a splendid character from his officer, was charged with the murder of a Canadian private who tried to separate two quarrelling soldiers in a bar. The prisoner had drunk much whisky and remembered nothing of his crime, and was sentenced to twelve months’ hard labour for manslaughter. The judge hoped he might be used as a soldier in the Russian Army.

Record of Hampshire Assizes, February 1916

A man from Prohibition Russia enlisted in Prohibition Canada, and came to England. He spent 9s. on drink one day, and that night he crept from his bed and killed his corporal at Witley Camp.

Police Records of Godalming, February 1917

A Canadian soldier, aged 26, after a publichouse quarrel with another soldier, was found dying on the pavement in Hastings. His throat had been cut, and he died on entering the hospital. The other soldier was charged with murder, and sentenced to 15 years.

Record of Hastings Assizes, March 1917

A young Canadian soldier, aged 20, died from alcohol while in training at Witley. He had a bottle of stout followed by nine or ten “double-headers” of neat whisky in about two hours. He was carried back to camp, laid unconscious on his bed, and died.

Facts in “Daily Chronicle,” March 22, 1917

A Canadian lieutenant was tried for the murder of a canteen sergeant. They arrived together at a house at Grayshott, where the lieutenant asked for some strong drink and took a bottle of whisky and two glasses. The sergeant was afterwards found dead in the cellar, and the lieutenant carried the body into the stable.

Records of Grayshott Coroner, December 1915

A man leaving a publichouse in company with a woman, with whom he had been drinking, met a Canadian soldier not far from Charing Cross. The soldier spoke, and the man struck him. The soldier was carried to the hospital, where he died soon afterwards from a wound two inches deep, caused by a knife.

Police Records of Bow Street, January 1, 1917

The wife of a gunner in the South African Heavy Artillery died at Bexhill from alcohol. The soldier said he bought 12 bottles of stout and 12 bottles of beer, one of whisky, and one of port, which they drank between Saturday night and Monday night.

Records of Bexhill Coroner, December 1915

A soldier from Toronto, having been drinking away his pay in a Carlisle publichouse, with another Canadian soldier and some married women, failed to appear the next morning, and was found dead on a footpath with a bottle of whisky in his pocket

Records of Carlisle Coroner, April 14, 1917

A Canadian soldier, having drawn £20 from the Canadian office, visited several publichouses, and was killed in a scuffle in London.

Facts in “Daily News,” December 2, 1916

The Men From the Prohibition Camps

Again and again we have seen the peculiar temptations of drink among Canadians. Officers, chief-constables, chaplains, newspapers, the men themselves, have all borne witness that to these men from Prohibition Canada the sudden temptations of our drink trade come with terrible power, and often they fall not knowing. The finest manhood of the Empire our tap-rooms and canteens destroy, not in isolated cases, but in a host we dare not number.

Of the soldiers who first came over from Canada, says a great Canadian paper, many were emigrants from England, not yet securely planted in Canada, and for their sakes especially drink should have been withheld from them. Of the larger number of Canadian troops that followed them, many were youths who had never known drink, and they were taken from home at the most social and reckless age, to face drink with all the temptations induced by the nervous strain, the hardships and social abandon of the camp and the trench, and the free pocket-money when on leave.

In an officers’ mess of two double companies of Canadians only one officer drank on his arrival in a canteen camp in England; within three months there was not an abstainer in the mess.

Facts told at Society for Study of Inebriety, Jan. 10, 1916

These men come mostly from districts in Canada where intoxicants are prohibited by law, and many of them, being young lads, who perhaps have never tasted liquor before their arrival, fall easy victims.

Chief Constable of Godalming

Overseas soldiers come to our hospitals astonishingly cheerful and fit in a general sense, and wonderfully receptive to treatment. Only three per thousand die in our great hospitals. This is largely due to the hardy life of the men and the fact that they are removed from the danger of taking too much alcohol. The home troops have a much higher mortality, partly because their use of alcohol diminishes their chances. Re-admissions are largely due to drink on furlough.

Major Maclean, M.D., of the Third Western General Hospital

A Canadian soldier, who had been wounded at the Front, was taken to a house by women and left alone drunk. An officer gave him an excellent character, and said he was on his way back to Canada. These men experience temptations here (he said) that they would not find in Canada, and there was too much of this going on.

Hastings Police Records, February 19, 1917

I heard a sad account of the havoc of the wet canteen and a private in a Canadian A.M.C. told us of a lad of 17 who is made so drunk that there is rarely a night when he has not to be helped up to bed. One of the soldiers here told me of his son in Canada being anxious to join up, but after seeing the condition of things over here he was doing all he could to discourage his son.

Letter to the Author

The Canadians in most cases are entirely lost when they arrive in this country, and are much more liable to the temptation which is thrown in their way, but when you give a figure such as this—that in one camp during last year, and two months of the previous year, there were 7,000 cases—it seems to me that it is about time we realised the magnitude of the evil. I do not know what has happened to them, except that I imagine a large number have gone back to Canada, and have not been able to play the part they had hoped to play.

Captain Guest in Parliament, April 23, 1917

In Camp and On Leave

Everywhere we find the trail of drink among Canadians—in camp and on leave.

A Canadian corporal, wounded in the Battle of Ypres, was found terribly drunk after being missing all day from hospital. Confronted with the surgeon after violent acts of insubordination, the corporal broke down and cried like a child.

Facts in “Western Mail,” February 18, 1916

In the first weeks of the war 42 Canadian soldiers disgraced themselves, by excessive drinking, insubordination, and disorderly conduct, to such an extent that they had to be sent back to Canada.

Facts in “Canadian Pioneer,” December 4, 1914

A Canadian soldier, helplessly drunk, was seen at King’s Cross station eating, tearing, and crumpling up £1 notes, and would have lost about fifteen pounds but for kindly help from passers by.

Facts in “Daily Chronicle,” September 28, 1916

A gunner from Montreal, missing from camp for several days, drank himself delirious, and cut his throat with a razor.

Facts in “Canadian Pioneer,” December 4, 1914

A Canadian soldier spent £70 in three weeks on drink and bad characters.

Facts in “Daily Mail” August 10, 1915

A Sergeant-Major from Canada declared that he had lost 20 per cent. of the men of his battery through venereal disease. They had a little drink, and were captured by the swarm of bad women at Folkestone.

Facts in Letter to Author

A woman was imprisoned for placing young children in moral danger. Every night the girls brought soldiers home, and colonial soldiers were frequently so drunk that they were carried in.

Records of Central Criminal Court, April 25, 1917

The Rising Storm in Canada

The thing cannot be justified. It is the blackest tragedy of this whole war that, in fighting for freedom in Europe, the free sons of the British breed have to face this war-time record of waste at home, with its inevitable toll of debauchery and crime.

Editorial in “Toronto Globe”

While this book was being written one of the greatest meetings ever held in Manchester was cheering a Canadian in khaki who declared that he was not going hungry while brewers were destroying food, and he went on to say, this soldier and sportsman well-known in the Dominion:

“Great numbers of our men never saw France. Canadian boys cried because they had not munitions. England reeled and beer flowed like water while thousands of our boys went down into their graves. We will never forget it in Canada.”

We may be sure Canada will not forget. She will not forget her dead: she will not forget that the Drink Traffic she has swept away at home struck down her sons in the land for which they fought. “We must know who is to blame,” says a Canadian paper; “we presume they will have no objection to have their names placarded before the country, that every mother may know.” Col. Sir Hamar Greenwood, M. P., has lately returned from Canada, and this is what he tells us:

“I met many fathers and mothers whose boys had been sent back to Canada debilitated and ruined for life because they had been enmeshed by harpies, and again and again these parents have said to me, ‘We do not mind our boys dying on the field of battle for old England, but to think that we sent our sons to England to come back to us ruined in health, and a disgrace to us, to them, and to the country, is something the Home Country should never ask us to bear.’”

Letter from a Solicitor in Ontario to the Author:

I wonder if the advocates of the drink traffic in Britain appreciate the contempt in which they are held in Canada. Before the war I had a class of ten young men. Every one of them is now at the Front, and one writes that when I told them of the drink conditions in England he did not believe half of it; now he says I did not tell him half. Letters from our Canadian soldiers are appearing in our papers, and they are all amazed at the drinking habits of Britain.

From a Resolution received by Mr. Lloyd George from the Social Service Council of Nova Scotia:

That we, representing the social, moral, and spiritual forces of this part of the British Empire, who have proved our loyalty by the thousands of men this small province has sent overseas, do record our most earnest protest against Britain’s inaction in this matter, which we are sure must result in longer and increased suffering for the men we have sent to help her win the war; and do most insistently plead with the British Government and the British Parliament that they at once exercise the power vested in them to strike the blow that will dispose of this enemy at home, and so give mighty reinforcement to those who are bleeding and dying for Britain and human liberties on the battlefields abroad.

Sermon by Dr. Flanders in London, Ontario, Feb. 25, 1917:

Canada has the right to make this demand on the Motherland from the simple standpoint of political economics. That we might put the Dominion into the best possible shape to give the utmost of our strength in men and munitions, we have an almost Dominion-wide Prohibition, and no intelligent person will deny that our contributions to the war from the first have been multiplied and intensified by that action. Why should little Johnnie Canuck abolish drink that he might conserve his manhood and material resources in the interest of the Empire’s war, and big John Bull refuse to abolish the traffic to the great waste of his material resources and the undoing of his efficiency?

A public man with three soldier sons wrote to the Toronto Globe:

Canada, for efficiency in war, casts out the drink evil. Is it too much to expect Britain, in fairness, to do the same? Is it not a mockery for the British Isles to face our common struggle with this palsy in her frame?

Here is the bitter pill, the embittering thought for many a Canadian parent. Let me be a type. Three of my sons are in khaki. I gave them a father’s blessing when they enlisted. But this thought strains, most of all, the ties of my loyalty to the cause—to see my sons fight and fall for a Britain that at home is saddled by distillery interests, and misguided by a Press silent as the grave on this entrenched evil. Why should our sons go from a country where booze is banished to spend months on the way to the trenches in England, where the vices of the liquor traffic are legalised?

We see the spirit of Canada in those great words of the Premier of Ontario, Mr. Hearst, speaking of the giving up of drink:

In this day of national peril, in this day when the future of the British Empire, the freedom of the world, and the blessings of democratic government hang in the balance, if I should fail to listen to what I believe to be the call of duty, if I should neglect to take every action that in my judgment will help to conserve the financial strength and power and manhood of this province for the great struggle in which we are engaged, I would be a traitor to my country, a traitor to my own conscience, and unworthy of the brave sons of Canada that are fighting, bleeding and dying for freedom and for us.

A letter from one of the most eminent public men in Canada:

“British Canada is intensely loyal to the Empire and the Allied Cause, but at present recruiting is almost at an end. Why? Partly because of considerable dissatisfaction with many of the conditions which prevail. Suffering, wounds, death, are expected as inevitable in war, but the evil influences, the lavish temptations of liquor and bad women which sweep down upon our boys in England, are not felt to be necessary, and the hearts of multitudes of Canadian parents are hot with indignation at the apparent indifference of the authorities to the moral welfare of our troops.”

Captain John MacNeill, with the Canadian troops in France:

“I say to you solemnly, if England should lose this war because of drink, or if England should unnecessarily prolong the war with great sacrifice of life in her effort to protect drink, or even if England should win the war in spite of drink, you will have put upon the bonds of Empire such a strain as they have never known before, and such a strain as we cannot promise they will be able to survive.”

From the petition presented to the Prime Minister of Canada, signed by 64,000 mothers and wives in Toronto:

1. That Mothers and Wives of Canada in giving their sons and husbands for King and Empire, asked and received from your Minister of Militia this only assurance that, in sending them into the ranks, we were not hereby irrevocably thrusting them into the temptation of Strong Drink.

2. We appreciated from the depths of our hearts, your action in abolishing the Wet Canteen from the Canadian Militia. We believe the Wet Canteen established in the ranks of the front to be a double danger, robbing our King of the success in arms which in these days comes only to the brave heart that is controlled by a clear head, and robbing us and our Canada of the Manhood which we gave into our Empire’s keeping.

3. We do not believe that the King will refuse the aid of Canada’s sons; nor that he will appreciate your patriotic efforts the less, if you keep faith with us and make known to His Majesty, his Ministers and Commanders, that our boys are sent forth on the one condition that the dispensing of intoxicating liquors shall be prohibited in the ranks.

From a Sermon preached in Ontario, February 25, 1917:

“Thank God, if any of our Canadian soldiers return to us with the drink habit formed and raging, we can welcome them to a land nearly purged of the liquor traffic, where they may have a chance to recover their manhood.”

Letter on the effects of Prohibition, from a business man in Ontario, published in the “Spectator:”

“Men I have known for years to be regular promenading tanks have given it up, and are starting a decent life again. The Police Court is empty. England should try it. It would be, after the first heavy initial loss, the best thing that ever struck the nation. I cursed these temperance guys as hard as any, but all the same it cannot blind you from the truth.”

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