Defeat or victory? the Strength of Britain Book ..

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Reprinted in the United States By the American Issue Publishing Company westerville. Ohio

DEFEAT or VICTORY?

The Strength of Britain Book

Preface To The New Edition

This book, of the first edition of which one hundred thousand copies were sold in 20 days, has now been adopted by the Strength of Britain Movement, and is re-issued — as "Defeat or Victory?" for, indeed, its publication as "Defeat?" has brought Victory nearer.

A few notes may here be permitted in reference to my original introduction which is hereafter reprinted. Its proof of the indeed self-evident truth that the brewer does not produce milk, but destroys^it, has now been officially confirmed by the Food Controller, who, in point blank contradiction of his colleague — supposed to be our Food Producer — now demands a reduction of 30 per cent, in the destruction of food by brewing, in order, he tells us, to favor the production of meat and milk. In this the Committee of the Royal Society now confirms him,

But if a 30 per cent reduction of the present output of beer will save food at the rate of more than 300,000 tons per annum, as Lord Davenport tells us, he and the Government are clearly self-impugned of gambling with the German submarines, the Fate of Freedom being the stake, by permitting 70 per cent of this infamous and colossal destruction of food to continue. It is for the nation to decide Whether such sport shall go on, scarcely distinguishable from Imperial treachery and suicide.

Our food supply is at this hour being also impaired by the continued use of freight space in our ships for the import of food which the brewers will destroy ; whisky is yet distilled, though we have enough for several years' consumption ; and Mr. Prothero, who cannot be unaware that hops are not a food, but a narcotic drug — of all things to grow now — has surpassed himself. At Maidstone on February 1 — the day inaugurating Germany's last cast against our food — he stated our hop-gardens to be 31,000 acres, and depreciated the growth of food thereon, saying that the crop would only feed the nation for a day and a half. A few minutes later he called upon farmers "to grow every pound of bread in the country that was possible." A Minister for the growth of food who has alarmed and displeased everyone but the food-destroyers, with an obvious contradiction of the truth which the Food Controller has now stated, and who contrives in one speech to call for every pound of bread and to say that bread for 46,000,000 people for a day and a half does not matter — what has the Strength of Britain to hope from him? As much or as little, one fancies, as from politicians who ask for economy and contributions to the War Loan but who never mention drink and have evidently never heard of the King's Pledge. It

\\ as Lord Kitchener who asked the nation to give up drinking in order to help the War Loans, but he was only an honest man, with no secret masters, the 'Vendors of death," as Ruskin called them, to serve.

The Government at this tremendous hour knows that there is no answer to the demand of the Strength of Britain Movement, which is supported by millions of our imperial fellow-citizens throughout the world. Is it free and brave enough to do its urgent and palpable duty? Or are the citizens of the Empire, from our Memorialists to the humblest Tommy and the latest recruit of the Salvation Army, to be counted brave and loyal without avail because the King's Government was venal or afraid?

February 10, 1917. C. W. S.

, 6

Introduction To The First Hundred Thousand

If Sir Victor Horsley had been alive, doubtless he would have been asked to write an introduction to this splendid little book. The greatest, surgeon of the century left ease and profit to die for Freedom's Trustees in Mesopotamia, whence one of his last letters was a protest which is quoted in its place hereafter. For some statements of a scientific kind our authors came to me in aid of their book. But all that is already available, for a shilling, in the complete new 1915 edition of Sir Victor's and Dr. Mary Sturge's "Alcohol and the Human Body" with its special chapters directed to our experience in this war. To them the reader may be referred for the citation of the evidence when he reads many of the following pages.

As regards the influence of alcohol, used as a pro-German poison in the Army, let there here be only noted that glorious fight, Y. M. C. A. versus Wet Canteen, the longest and most momentous battle of the war, which has been waged with such glorious vigor by Christian and Jew, Anglican, Roman Catholic, Nonconformist, Salvationist, and Agnostic, under the aegis of that most truly Christian Association on the earth.

But the appeal of this book is to the nation ; our authors know well that public opinion rules the land, and that it need only say for the Prohibition of this accursed destroyer of our manhood, our food, and our future. To this end Mr. Mee calls upon the strength of Britain as an honorary secretary of the movement he has named in that fine phrase, and of which, as one interested in public health, the basis of all efficiency, I have the honor to be Chairman. From our new Government — which would not be in being had not surrender to alcohol paved the way for its predecessor's failure and fall — the * Strength of Britain Movement now awaits an answer to the most wonderful and significant memorial of its kind in history.

, No answer but one would appear to be possible, but the issue depends on whether this Government is, or is not, the first in our history that could defy the cannibal trade, which has dictated its will to all Governments hitherto ; and that, in its turn, depends upon the people.

We may have what we please. Mr. Lloyd George demands for food "every yard" that can grow it. The Garden of England contains at this moment 30,000 acres of admirable soil, amply manured, that will grow food at last, if we please, instead of bitter rubbish as hitherto. If the Government now allows hops to be grown there, we shall know that when the teetotal Prime Minister of our teetotal King, in the crisis of our history, said "every yard," he meant every yard the brewers do not want for their already swollen pockets and our destruction.

The problem of the distiller is solved. We need all the alcohol we can get for victory; it would seem obvious that the Committee now trying" to securest would begin by recommending the Prohibition of alcohol for defeat.

But the case of the brewers is not so simple. They have a friend in a high place, who, in a speech containing the greatest compliment to the German Navy and the greatest insult to our own yet heard (that we are a "Beleaguered city") went out of his way to utter the obvious nonsense, which would not deceive one of the infants so mortally concerned with it — that the brewer "produces milk." Certain food produced by the farmer having been destroyed by the brewer, the remainder may feed cows; and this our new Minister of Agriculture interprets as signifying that the brewer "produces milk."

The matter is a serious one. The only essential use of milk is for the infants whom their mothers cannot or will not feed. It should be known to Mr. Prothero that the use of brewers' grains is forbidden to the farmers who supply milk to Copenhagen, the capital city of the world's exemplar in dairy farming; that these grains are condemned by our best medical authority on the production of milk for the infant as involving it in grave dangers; and that enlightened Health Boards all over the world forbid the use of brewers' grains owing to their notorious consequences for the milk, except when moderately used under conditions which in practice are never fulfilled.

The brewer and the distiller are destroyers of food, nothing more and nothing less. Except by the destruction of carbohydrate foods, starch and sugar, they cannot make alcohol. If the alcohol be used for its thousand life-serving purposes, in peace or in war, the destruction of food not still more essential to life is justified; otherwise it is waste and worse, the turning of treasure into trash, of food into poison.

These are simple chemical truths which we should all know had we not been brought up under an educational system which calls chemistry — the very architect of civilization — by the name of "stinks." But for this we should not be deceived when the brewers tell us, for instance, that they use only six per cent of the nation's sugar, less than goes into non-intoxicating drinks. The sugar in non-alcoholic drinks, as in tea or fruit, is used ; it burns in the heart and other muscles, and maintains the life. The sugar the brewer takes he destroys so that no man can use it. Further, the brewer does not mention the colossal quantities of starch he uses; but starch and sugar are simply two forms of the same thing, and all the starch the brewer destroys is food as such, as is the sugar into which it can at any time be turned. These commonplaces of elementary science disputed by no one ; in all the trade replies to these pages not one of our food destroyers will challenge this paragraph.

The value of alcohol as a motor, illuminant, source of blessed drugs, and for a thousand industrial uses furnishes the answer to the pietistic section of the alcoholic party who, with the characteristic cunning of the feeble-minded, say that, since God made alcohol, man should swallow it. The argument would apply to petrol or prussic acid. Whatever our concepts may be of God, assuredly He is not mocked by arguments as ignorant or dishonest as these.

To this nation has now come the moment to decide. Whatever our fate, at least it will stand on the national record that there were not a few men and women in Britain who saw the Truth when it was as clear as the sun at high noon, and who knew and proclaimed that the Truth alone could keep us free.

C. W. SALEEBY.

Contents

PAGE

Preface to the New Edition 5

I. The Great Betrayal . 11

II. The Tragedy of Man-Power 16

III. The Soldier's Peril 23

IV. The Menace to the Empire 31

V. Let Us Call the Witnesses 37

VI. The Destruction of Food 39

VII. The Lost Hundred Days 44

VIII. Interfering With the Navy 48

IX. Our Wasted Millions 51

X. Ships, Docks and Trains 53

XI. Winning and Losing 54

XII. Fooling With the Enemy ,61

XIII. The Mobilization of Alcohol .70

XIV. The Only Way 73

XV. The Strength of Britain Speaks . • • ■ - 75

With the Strength of Britain Memorial

XVI. What is to be Done.? 81

Chapter I The Great Betrayal

THERE does not beat a human heart in Britain, worthy oi the freedom it enjoys, that does not throb with pain at the thought that perhaps we may be beaten. In all the range of human thought, in all the emotions that stir the life of man, is nothing more terrible than the thought that perhaps, by some unspeakable calamity, this land of Drake and Nelson May suffer defeat.

It cannot be. It shall not be. We dare not think of it, and the word will not come to our lips. There is not in these islands a soul so dead that he dare talk of our defeat.

And yet there is not in these islands a man with mind so dead that he does not see what all the world can see. We stand confronted with all the powers of scientific deviltry. All Europe rocks and reels. From morning to night, from night till morning, the manhood of the nations is marching to its grave. Not for the first time in this island's story, afflicted Europe looks to her for a refuge and a strength in time of trouble. And Europe has not looked in vain, for this island has done wonders. She has done wonders that we little thought possible. But the things she has not done, the great and noble things that might have kept us company on our redeeming way — ah! what shall we say of these?

We must say of them that this country has deprived herself of mighty powers of victory; that while her young men have gone forth to wounds and death, we at home have done less than our part. For them there were the trenches and the German guns ; for us there is Britain still — still the warm fireside, the well-furnished table, and all that most of us want. The sacrifice of war has yet to come for us at home. Out there men bear the burden and the agony; here we read of it and are stirred and thrilled, yet never are we thrilled to supreme sacrifice. There men are true till death for Britain's sake ; but Britain is not true in life and ease.

It is time, it is surely more than time, that it was said. It is time, surely, with the war far in'tox its third year, that we took our paft in it at home. The power of a nation is not in its materials. Behind its guns and shells, behind its wealth and visible powers, is the soul of the people, without which all is in vain. And the soul of our people, deeply stirred in that far-off autumn of 1914, has lost

DEFEAT?

touch with those great heights it reached when the Prime Minister led us to believe that no sacrifice was too great with freedom and honor at stake.

We believed it then ; our men went out believing it ; they went to their graves believing it. But it is not true. We have lost our beliei in sacrifice. We have believed we could pull through without it. What has happened is that the Government of this country, in the gravest crisis with which we were ever confronted, declared to our people that, whatever they might have said on our platforms, whatever glowing phrases they sent ringing round the world from the Guildhall, the supreme act of sacrifice we called for abroad was not called for at home. It is pitifully true, and in it lies the secret of the lengthening war.

The war goes on, and will go on, because we have not paid the price of victory. We are shirkers yet.

Let us use plain words. There is a canker in the life of Britain. As a strong man throws off poisons, so do nations in their strength ; but the time comes when poisons have their way. And so the time came to Europe. Britain, France, and Russia, when the war burst suddenly upon Europe, had each its great internal problem to be solved. Within a few days Russia made her choice. Within a few weeks France had followed her. A little longer and Britain, too, was face to face with the peril her allies had put away from them.

The Prussian barbarians were pressing on, but the great British power moved slowly. We were short of guns and men, and we were short from a cause that was easily controllable. It was not that our ships could not bring in the raw materials across the sea ; it was not that the gates of the world were closed against us ; it was not that the war conditions made it difficult for our workshops to rise to the glorious part that fell to them in saving Europe : it was simply that an enemy within our gates, an ancient foe of ours, had its brake on Britain all the time. It was nothing new, except that the brake was pressing more and more upon our wheels; but those who sleep in peace wake up in war, and we found in this hour of our trial what our drink trade really means. We found that while the Prohibition workshops of America poured out shells and guns for us in quantities never known before, the workshops of this country, with* an enervating stream of alcohol forever running through them, were doing less than usual.

It was a ghastly discovery for those who had been blind so long, for it meant that this great trade, existing on the social pleasures of our people, stood in our path as we set out to fight once more the

THE GREAT BETRAYAL

fight that Wellington and Nelson 'fought. It meant that this trade, serving no other purpose in the world than to gratify acquired appetites, had become an open menace to us all ; it meant that in the face of this grave crisis that involved all Europe there arose in Britain a strangling force that broke our ancient power. We were not to throw our whole weight in the scale, but such a weight as we had left when a private trade had done with us. The Bill of Rights is there for all mankind to read, and it says that the Government of a country is constituted for the "protection, safety, and happiness of the people, and not for the profit or private interests of any class of men." That would seem an adequate indictment of a private trade which the King himself declares to have imperiled the supplies of our Armies and our Fleet, and to have prolonged the war. And there we stood, when the war was six months old.

This truth it was that clapped like thunder through the State — that this nation, mother of freedom and guardian of the liberties of the human race, was on the edge of a precipice: we were looking down in the abyss, and we were fooling with drink.

Will it be believed, we may wonder, when the historian comes to write the story of these times, that in the spring of 1915 the destinies of Britain were in the hands of men who saw these things, who knew them well, who were warned — not once nor twice, but many times — that our armies and fleets were in peril through drink, but who listened to the warnings and did nothing. Will it be believed that, though the King himself was moved to shame and indignation by these revelations, though he banished alcohol from all his palaces, though the Minister for War did the same in the interests of the Army, though the Chancellor of the Exchequer did the same in the interests of our national finance, though the Primate led the way for the Church, though the Government of Nova Scotia did the same in the interests of the Empire, the Government of this country took little notice, and the House of Commons mocked at it and laughed it all to scorn? We may predict that it will hardly be believed; but one thing is certain — the historian will see in that the explanation of that public indifference which for two years now has been our peril, and of that reluctance for sacrifice at home which must break the heart of those abroad.

For it is clear as the noonday sun, as plain as the murder of Belgium, what happened when the Government of this country refused to follow the King to victory. The King expected the Prohibition of alcohol; Mr. Lloyd George meant that it should come; Lord Kitchener had already anticipated both ; and the fact which

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moved them all was the peril in which the nation stood from this private trade. But when, after all that had been said, the Government went on drinking, the argument in the nation was perfectly clear. If the King was right, if it was really true that drink had kept back guns and shells and prolonged the war, no Government on this earth dare have let that thing go on. It was inconceivable that a Government could so betray our country and our Allies in the cause of human freedom; and so the King and Lord Kitchener and Air. Lloyd George and their advisers must all have been wrong.

It must be said that the argument is sound, and only one thing more is there to say concerning it — that upon that Government there rests, in face of the world and in the face of history, the responsibility of the gravest betrayal of our people in all our annals. That Government could have sown such seed as would have borne fruit like unto a millennium ; it could have broken the habits of weakness that have so long endangered this country, and implanted new habits of strength ; it could have speeded up the war, hastened victory, and saved the lives and limbs of hundreds of thousands of men; and it could have laid the broad foundations of a British Kingdom of such power as Drake and Nelson never dreamed of, for we should have arrived at the Great Peace with our enemy without and our enemy within both under our feet forever. A little model for the mighty world this realm, this England, would have been indeed.

But no, the opportunity was thrown away. The House of Commons kept open its bars defiantly, that our elected rulers could leave the Council Chamber at any hour they pleased, to patronize, at the bars of Parliament, this trade that the King had banished from his house. We have seen how things work in war; it is not enough, unhappily, to ask a nation to give up this or that. Voluntaryism fails. There are not enough people in any nation who love the nation better than themselves; there are not enough people in any country who love truth better than their selfish interests. We must put a man on his oath in a court of law, we must call for witnesses of this or that. It was not enough to ask that our factories should make as many shells as possible ; it was not enough to ask that people should give up buying motor-cars, or using petrol for pleasure, or gambling at race meetings ; it was not enough to ask that every able man should offer his life for his country. Slowly but surely compulsion came in such things — how slowly, and how bitterly our army must have paid for it, we know full well. But there was no compulsion — there was not even a Government's encouragement and example — for trie greatest need of all, for the sacrifice that would have cost a little

THE GREAT BETRAYAL pleasure and put our nation at full strength against her foes. This we could please ourselves about, for, as for the Government, had it not told. us that it did not matter?

That Government of the Great Betrayal, and the great hour that came to it, have gone, but the war is with us still, and we are not at the end. The bold decision that would have made the Government immortal in the story of the world was not made. The Government sat down to muddle through as Governments have done before. It made up its mind that it could face the gravest danger in which Britain ever stood' with less than her full strength; it made up its mind that, as Francis Drake could go on bowling and beat the Spaniards, so it could go on drinking and beat the Germans too. By their fruits ye shall know them. Sir Francis Drake won his game of bowls and beat the Spaniards ; this British Government went on drinking and did hot beat the Germans. What it did was to depress the people, to put a millstone round the necks of those who fought for greater strength, to fill with a sense of despair all those who hoped we were in earnest, to dim that noble vision with which we all set out in 1914 on our great journey to the final peace and freedom of the world.

The greatest effort ever made to save us from our greatest foe had failed. One would have thought that Lord Kitchener, Mr. Lloyd George, and the King stood for the strength of Britain in those days, and all three stood for Prohibition. They knew the facts. They knew that we were fighting two great wars ; they knew that Germany was pressing on, and that her agents in this country, these hundred thousand fortresses of weakness set up in all our streets, were worth to the Kaiser many divisions of troops. The evidence was there before them ; it is written in plain words by the Government's own advisers, by men who had never said a public word for temperance in all their lives, but who saw the enemy before them and did their duty by letting the nation know that it was there. They spoke in vain ; we had lost the great moral battle of Downing Street. The three strong men to whom we looked to win the foreign war had lost the war at horns, and it was a bad omen. Both here and out in France things went from bad to worse.

Nearly two years have passed since then, and how does it stand with Britain? We stand at the parting of the ways once more; the power that guides our destinies has brought us round once more to the Gate of Opportunity; the golden moment has come back again. We can put on the whole armour of Britain ; we can rise — not in courage, but in willingness of sacrifice — to the height of those who

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die for us. We can quit ourselves like a great nation and be worthy of our living- and our, dead; or we can go on drinking and hang our heads in shame as we walk through France and Russia in the years to come.

The hour is striking, and the nation waits.

Chapter II The Tragedy Of Man-power

Is there, in all the story of this war and the years of our life that led up to it, anything more appalling than the man-power tragedy of the British people?

For a generation Germany had been preparing the blow that has fallen on Europe. With all the resources of science at her hand she stalked across Europe like a wolf in sheep's clothing. With the powers she drew from the Electric Age she allied the morals of the Age of Stone.

But what shall we say of our doings in these fifty years since Prussia first became the troubler of the world? We have seen her power grow up in Central Europe, and let us tell the truth — we have allowed an enemy to sow simultaneously in our own country the seeds of a hostile power that were to bear their full fruit when the German blow fell. The drink trade in these fifty years has deprived this country of man-power equivalent to the whole of the British Army under arms.

It could be shown that if all the lives that have been broken and destroyed by drink in these islands had been free from drink and had pursued their normal way, the population of this country would have been many millions nearer to that of Germany ; our manhood would have been stronger and cleaner and more enduring. There would have been millions of boys coming up who, thanks to drink, have not been born. When we think of slums, of disease and poverty and all the miseries the poor are Tieir to, we think of a tragedy of life that is nine-tenths drink. As the plague of flies exists and breeds in all the elements of decay, so the plague of drink exists and thrives in all the elements of degeneration and defeat. Drink cuts down life as a knife cuts chaff, and we count in millions the loss of population that is due to drink in these fifty years while Prussia has been building up her power.

If you would know how we destroy our children, there is a little war book that will tell you : it is Dr. N.orman Maclean's noble book,

THE TRAGEDY OF MAN-POWER

"Stand Up, Ye Dead." You can read it in an hour or two, and you will never forget it. Unless you have the heart of a Kaiser, it must thrill you through and through. You will learn from it that we sacrifice one-third of our possible growth of population, following in the way of France, which: cries in vain today for her lost men. There are other causes than drink for these things, but there is tragic meaning in the words of One of our great Medical Officers of Health, Dr. Millard of Leicester, who says that were he offered the abolition of drink alone, or of all the other enemies of public health put together, he would choose the abolition of drink. And drink does more than rob us of our children; it robs us of the health of hosts of those it leaves alive. It steals the capital strength of a human being before it comes into the world ; it brings him into life maimed and crippled, with a millstone round his neck. The very atmosphere of alcohol is harmful to a child. Children subject to its influence are checked in their growth, and the structure of their brains can never reach perfection.

Let us look at a few cases out of many thousands and see what drink is doing with these little ones that come into the world and might be heroes. One of them was born of a drinking mother and it ailed, as the child of a drinking mother will. She took it to a public-house and stood there drinking, and as she stood it died, but the mother went on drinking. The other case concerns a family of eight, living in one room. It is one of the homes the British Army and the British Fleet are fighting for. The eldest boy was 21, and he lay the other day on the only bed in the only room. He was dying of consumption, but that night he was put on the floor, for the bed was wanted for the mother and the little one that was to be born. Then the mother and the baby left the bed for the boy to die in. He was gone in a day or two, and soon the mother, the little baby, and another girl followed him to the grave, a happier place than their English home. There was a man still leit who called himself a husband and father, and he celebrated their deaths by getting drunk. There is a country still left, and it calls itself great, but it is the slave of a devilish trade which does things like this and dares to claim the right to live as if it were an honest thing and to be bought out. "