Four years ago the United States of America, by a two-thirds majority, voted prohibition of the sale of alcoholic liquors. The British House of Commons have just voted down a bill for the same purpose by a majority of 236 to 14. America treats prohibition as one of its greatest moral triumphs. Britain treats it as a joke.  
What accounts for this remarkable disparity in the attitude of the two great English-speaking communities towards one of the most baffling and elusive problems civilisation has to deal with? It cannot be a fundamental difference in temperament or in moral outlook. The men who engineered prohibition in America are of our own race and kind, bred in the Puritan traditions that came originally from our shores.
 
If the evils of excessive drinking had been more apparent in America than in Britain I could understand the States of the union deciding to take[Pg 351] more drastic action than has been thought necessary in our country. But the facts are exactly the reverse. The consumption of alcohol in the United Kingdom some years before the war per head of the population was higher than that of the United States. The poverty, disease, and squalor caused by alcohol was much greater in Britain than in America.
 
What, then, accounts for the readiness of America to forbid the sale and the reluctance of Britain even seriously to restrict it?
 
I would not care to dogmatise on the subject, but I will hazard two or three possible explanations.
 
I set aside the suggestion that property owners are frightened by the sequel to prohibition in Russia. I have heard it argued that the prohibition ukase of the tsar was responsible for the Russian revolution. That is probably true, for a people stupefied by alcohol will stand anything. The inefficiency and corruption of the tsarist régime was so appalling that no sober nation could have tolerated it without rebellion for a single year, and when the fumes of vodka ceased to muddle and blind the moujik, he rebelled against the autocracy[Pg 352] that had betrayed his country into disaster. The Russian experiment in drink, therefore, contains no warning against prohibition, except a very limited one, that those who wish to misrule a country in safety must first of all drench it with alcohol.
 
There is, of course, the ready explanation that old countries are very conservative, and do not take kindly to change. Their joints are stiff with age, and they creak along well-worn paths slowly and painfully, but they lack the suppleness of limb that tempts younger communities to sprint across untrodden country. That is the argument. I am afraid this explanation will not hold. Old countries when thoroughly moved can leap like the hart. The French Revolution demonstrated how vigorously one of the oldest nations of Europe could tear along unbroken tracks when impelled by a new passion. And I saw Britain spring to arms in 1914, when five millions of men joined the colours without the lash of compulsion to stir their blood. England renewed her youth, and her movements had the energy, the audacity, and the endurance of a people untired by a march of centuries. This people, if stirred by a call which reaches its heart or conscience, is capable of action as bold as that which[Pg 353] wrested Magna Charta out of a despot in the twelfth century, overthrew an ancient religion in the fifteenth century, led a king to the scaffold in the seventeenth century, or challenged the greatest military empires in the world in the sixteenth, the nineteenth, and the twentieth centuries. And if they were convinced that the liquor traffic must be destroyed, they would execute it with as little compunction or hesitation as they displayed in suppressing the mass or in decapitating Charles I.
 
At the present moment the British people are not in the least persuaded that the evils of alcohol for a minority of the population cannot be dealt with effectively without resorting to the very drastic expedient of forbidding its consumption by the majority who use it in moderation. Are they likely to be convinced? That depends on the failure or success of all other expedients to exterminate the evil of alcoholism.
 
That brings me to another explanation. America reached prohibition by the path of experiment. The federal system lent itself to the trial of every form of remedy, including prohibition. For well over half a century you have had almost every form of temperance expedient ever suggested in actual[Pg 354] working in some State or other of the American republic.
 
When I was a lad I heard debates and addresses in Welsh about the comparative merits of the "Maine Law" and high license. High license, reduction of licenses, local option, prohibition, have all been tried. They have all been in operation quite long enough to enable the American public to form a judgment on their merits. Statistical results over long periods constitute a reliable basis for inference. American federalism furnished the opportunity, and the States took full advantage of it. Hence the prohibition law.
 
To the practical man the figures in the prohibition States looked attractive from a business point of view. He hesitated, but the moral wave that swept over America carried him over the bar. But without the experience at his door I doubt whether the American business man would have assented to prohibition.
 
The British constitution does not lend itself to these valuable experiments. Otherwise, London might have tried one experiment, Lancashire another, Yorkshire a third, Scotland a fourth, and Wales a fifth. The whole legislative power of the[Pg 355] United Kingdom was until quite recently vested in the imperial Parliament. Ireland has now a legislature of its own. In theory, what suited one part of the kingdom must do for the whole, and what did not suit the more populous parts could not be permitted to others.
 
As far as Scotland, Ireland, and Wales are concerned, there was in practic............