going to be quickened;
its moral forces are to be vastly strengthened; there is to be a new
earth when the war is over--if not a new heaven. These hopes are,
however, doomed to disappointment. It is not the ranks of those who
are striving for temperance that will receive {138} reinforcement when
the great army comes home.

Let any one who thinks that we are on the verge of a great social or
religious revival consider the facts. (The difficulty is that we fail
to face facts and delude ourselves with vain imaginings.) The great
fact to which we blind ourselves is that the manhood of the nation, for
the first time in its history, has been brought into the atmosphere of
alcohol, and acclimatised to that atmosphere to the number of between
four and five millions. In that remote period before August 1914, the
British army was a volunteer force mainly recruited from 'the
adventurous and the derelict.' The recruiting area was largely the
congested wards of our great cities. The men who enlisted did so, in
the great majority, after they had already acquired a taste for the
exhilaration of alcohol. It was in the circumstances expedient that in
the canteen provision should be made, under military supervision, for
their being supplied {139} with a purer alcohol than the public-houses
provided. The results were beneficial rather than otherwise.

The strange thing, however, is that the canteen system which was
necessary for the small voluntary army should have also been imposed by
the Army Authorities upon the full manhood of the nation when they
sprang to arms in defence of King and country. Though no trainer would
ever allow the use of alcohol by those preparing for any athletic
sport, though the man who would excel at football or racing or boxing
or shooting, as a first step eschewed all alcohol, the Government of
this country provided alcohol as an integral part of every camp where
the heroic of the race set themselves to endure hardness. 'The greater
endurance of the non-alcoholic soldier or worker is now not a matter on
which there can be or is any difference of opinion.'[1] For the youth
of the nation, {140} wearied with the hardness of unwonted exercise,
away from the influence of mothers and loved ones, warned by the
Secretary of State for War against alcohol, the Government provided the
narcotic of alcohol. Millions came within the sphere of its baneful
influence who never would have been so exposed in days o