TOTAL PROHIBITION.
[TO THE EDITOR OP THE " SPECTATOR."'
Sue —The following two stories are, I venture to think, worthy of publication, if only for the facts they reveal, lot alone the remedy they seem to suggest. (1) A wounded soldier in one of our Glasgow military hospitals, when conversing with a visitor, said : " I shall Shortly be having a pound, and ru drink it all." Appealed to on behalf of his wife and family, he said : " They can fend for them- selves ; I'm going to drink every penny of the pound when I get it." (2) In May last there entered the London and North-Western train at Crewe a stalwart West Coast fisherman and his daughter, both respect- ably dressed. The latter was silent and reser ved. She seated herself in one corner of the carriage, while her father, who soon proved to be particularly loquacious, occupied a seat at the opposite end of the compartment. The cause of his loquacity was soon evident ; but with it all, there was much sense in his remarks, and every indication that he was a man of no mean intellectual calibre. At Carlisle ho got out and returned with a bottle of whisky. His first remarks were : " I had to pay five shillings for it ; and if it had cost ton shillings I'd have paid it. I've got the money, and I'll have the whisky whatever it cost. If Lloyd George wants to stop me or any other man, why doesn't he stop its being sold altogether ? " Comment is unnecessary in the face of such flagrant examples of hopeless intemperance, except It be to indicate one very obvious cause of the increase of £17;495,000 expended on alcoholic liquors in 1915 over that in 1914 ; and to suggest that compulsory restraint exercised through total prohibition can alone save many of these poor spirit-sodden creatures from killing themselves, and ruining both the lives of others and the cause of their
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