[To THE Enron or THE " SPECTATOR.") Snz,—Week by week
I have watched your efforts to have Pro- hibition introduced during the war, a subject of much interest to me. In this small village of a hundred or so inhabitants there are three public-houses—there used to be four until quite recently. It has only one industry—viz., distilling whisky. Into the large distillery one sees strings of carts laden with barley being driven. For more than a month I have been trying to get some coal, my supply being nearly finished, but owing to press of work at the mines or congestion on the railway I have been unable to obtain it. Yet carts from the distillery have during this week been unloading two trucks, which have been put in a siding for them. On the platform of the little station I counted to-day fifteen cases, each containing one dozen bottles of whisky waiting to be sent off to various small customers. Every day there are sometimes more, sometimes fewer cases. Tho manager tells me they have never been so busy, and this in spite of high prices. Something seems to be wrong somewhere. And yet I want to be fair and vote for the thing that is best for the country. And so I ask you, Is the enclosed a truthful statement? If it is, we must take care that we do not raise the price of milk.—I am, [If our correspondent had looked at the letter signed " Chemist " in our last issue, he would have found the informa- tion required to answer the fallacious beer advertisement that he enclosed, which seems to have perturbed him. But we may as well deal with one or two points for the tenth or eleventh time. First, let us take the statement of the President of the Board of Agricule tare, which heads the advertisement, to the effect that " the brewer not only makes beer, but produces milk. If it wore not for the brewers' grains we could not send milk to our large towns in the quantity wo now do." This we have described as the "roast pig" argument. Lamb tells us in his delightful essay on "Roast Pig" how the Chinese burn down their houses in order to have the delights of eating crackling, but we have never heard it described as an economic way of arriving at that delicacy. Of course all that the words of the President of the Board of Agriculture mean is that barley can be used in various ways as food for cows. But cows produce milk. Therefore barley, even after the brewers have taken what they want out of it, if used as cattle food, produces milk. But surely the economic plan would be to put aside a certain amount of barley, say one-fifth or one- sixth, to be used in brewing, and let the other five-sixths be used for human food. The very able man of science who writes under the name of " Chemist" in last week's Spectator calculates that by the " roast pig - process of producing milk via the beer-vat we lose about eighty-three per cent. of the food value of the, barley which is elaimed by the 'brewer. With the latter part of the advertisement in which beer is proclaimed to be the "strength of Britain" we cannot attempt to deal. Those, however, who believe that " beer, glorious beer " is our best national asset are not likely to take our rather chastened view of the situation, which is that really mild beer in moderate quantities does not hurt people in peace time, but that it is a sort of luxury which we ought not to consume in war. When we are told that there is waste in so-called temperance drinks our withers are unwrung. We are perfectly willing that their use should be stopped during the war, and if the brewers will only start an agitation for prohibiting their •manufacture during the war, we will give it all the support we can. Altogether, the advertisement seems to us a most inadequate document. There is no getting over the plain fact that we are taking material which is fit for human food and turning it into intoxicants. That does not strike us as a sensible thing to do in a beleaguered city, which the Government tell us we are.—En. Spectator.]
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