izens of this country will acquire a liking for alcohol. They find
there the door of escape from weariness and monotony, a false joy of
life and a meretricious colour lighting up drab and grey days.
Hitherto the youths of this country were protected by the slow
evolution of beneficial restrictions. In Scotland the public-houses
were shut on Sundays. The young men were protected on at least one day
in seven. But when at the age of eighteen they put on the King's
uniform that protection ceases. {146} The public-house is shut, but
the canteen is open on Sunday. Not even on one day in seven is there
protection from temptation for the youths of this country now
conscripted. The fathers and mothers who give their sons to their
country do not realise the provision a grateful country is making for
darkening their souls by the fumes of alcohol. If they realised it,
there would arise a demand before which even those who refused to
follow their King would bow. Without that national demand there will
be no escape from the consequences of the great refusal. Those who
delude themselves with the hope that out of the great war will come a
moral and religious revival will have a rude awakening. Out of the
social conditions now upheld by a beneficent Government there cannot
emerge any ethical revival. The ranks of those who have learned the
narcotising benefit of alcohol and who will naturally turn to the same
comfort, will be greatly multiplied.

{147}

V

Let me conclude with a personal experience. On a car in one of our
great cities in this last summer, a man sitting beside me began a
conversation. Though he was a stranger to me, he began to speak out of
a heart sore distressed. His son had been home on leave. 'Every night
he was at home he was under the influence of drink. Before he enlisted
he did not know the taste of alcohol.... When he went away back, he
was drunk leaving the station.... A few days later word came that he
was killed.... The last we saw of him was his going away drunk....
His mother is in sore distress.... She is old-fashioned in her faith
and she cannot get out of her mind the words that drunkards cannot
enter the kingdom of God. What do you say?' Thus he spoke in
disjointed sentences, palpitating with emotion. All I could say was
that hell was not for such as his son, in my {148} opinion; but that
hell was essential for the due disciplining of those who maintained the
conditions whi