The Government came into office with the food shortage in sight; it was
its first duty to build up the great reserve of food we might have had
now in our granaries if the drink trade had not destroyed it. We could
have laughed at submarines, for our barns would have been filled to
overflowing, and we could have lived in comfort for a year if no ship
reached us.
Let us see how much food drink has destroyed during the war. We will
take it from August 4, 1914, to April 30, 1917. It is 999 days of the
war. The grain and sugar destroyed for drink have been:
Grain 4,400,000 tons
Sugar (for beer alone) 340,000 tons
[Illustration:
How Canada sees it—A Canadian cartoon of the callous destruction of
bread for beer and whisky]
It is not easy to realize what this means, but it will help us if we
think of one or two examples.
=The biggest thing ever set up on earth is the Great Pyramid. It is
80,000,000 cubic feet. The food destroyed by drink during the war would
make two Great Pyramids, each bigger than the Pyramid of Egypt.=
=The longest British railway is the Great Western; it is over 3,000
miles, but it would not hold the food destroyed by drink since war
began. If every inch of it were crammed with wagons, the Great Western
Railway would need hundreds of miles more line to hold the train-loads
of food destroyed.=
=There are about 750,000 railway wagons in the United Kingdom, but if
the Drink Trade had them all they would not hold the food it has
destroyed.=
=There are about 30,000 engines on our British railways, and if the food
destroyed were made up in trains of 125 tons apiece, all our engines
would not pull them; we should still want 10,000 more.=
So vast is this incredible quantity of food destroyed by an enemy trade
while famine has been coming on. We should have saved it all if
Parliament had followed the King, and it would have given the whole
United Kingdom its flour rations for nearly a year. Take it at its
minimum scientific human food value, and on the basis of our rations in
May, 1917, it would have given us:
Flour for the whole United Kingdom 43 weeks
Sugar for the whole United Kingdom 33 weeks
Our three war Governments, confronted with the increasing certainty of
at least a three-years’ war, have allowed the Drink Trade to destroy
this vast reserve of food.
The full toll of this trade upon our scanty food supply, growing shorter
and shorter while the queues outside our food shops grow longer and
longer, is staggering indeed, even now with drink about three-quarters
stopped. We must remember that it makes no difference that the barley
has been malted; it is still good human food, and every ounce of it
should be mixed with grain for making bread. Let us remember, also, that
_brewer’s sugar is a good pure sugar_, the objection to it being largely
the objection most of us have to standard bread—its colour. Malt or
sugar, every ounce a brewer destroys is food stolen from the people. Let
us take expert opinion on the subject.