Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 74

Labour's Worst Enemy

Labour's Worst Enemy.

On the economic aspect of the question a very few words must suffice. We spend, after deducting what goes to revenue, about £1,500,000 annually on drink; and probably another £1,000,000 to remedy the effects of this expenditure already described. For a country financially embarrassed the expenditure is doubly shocking. Putting moral considerations altogether aside, the traffic in strong drink is, economically speaking, the most wasteful of all industries, and the most damaging to the poorer classes. Of £l spent on clothes, the workmen employed get 16s.; if spent on shoes, they get 14s.; if spent on liquor, they get 6d. In addition to this the industry turns to waste grain that might otherwise have gone to fill the mouths of the hungry; £130,000 worth of grain was wasted in New Zealand last year in this way on brewing alone—our whisky we fortunately do not manufacture. Father Mathew realised the truth in Ireland in famine time, and hence he said: "The man or woman who drinks, drinks the food of the starving. Is not that man or woman a monster who drinks the food of the starving?" Professor Mayor, the distinguished Cambridge classic, realised it too, and turned teetotaller for no other reason.* The traffic is thus a triple curse to the poor:—It puts temptations in their way which they are less able to resist than those in more comfortable surroundings; it absorbs capital which would otherwise give them twenty times as much in wages; it absorbs material which would otherwise give them food.

* Kharaa, the great Chief of the Bamangwato, whom there is no objection to our calling a "savage" as long as it does not blind us to the fact that in all the Christian essentials of statesmanship he is immeasurably above the great majority of the rulers and voters of civilised Christendom, expresses the double waste involved very forcibly:—"You take the corn that God has given us in answer to prayer and destroy it. Yen not .only destroy it, but you make stuff with it that causes mischief among you."—See Review of Reviews, November, 1895, p. 499.