I do not believe that you will ever stop one man from
drinking by means of legislation; you may level every tavern over twenty
square miles, but you will not thereby prevent a fellow who has the
_bite_ of drink from boozing himself mad whenever he likes. As for
stopping a woman by such merely mechanical means as the closing of
public-houses, the idea is ridiculous to anybody who knows the foxy
cunning, the fixed determination of a female soaker. It is a great moral
and physical problem that we want to solve, and Bills and clauses are
only so much ink and paper which are ineffective as a schoolboy's
copybook. If a man has the desire for alcohol there is no power known
that can stop him from gratifying himself; the end to be aimed at is to
remove the desire--to get the drinker past that stage when the craving
presses hardly on him, and you can never bring that about by rules and
regulations. I grant that the clusters of drink-shops which are stuck
together in the slums of our big towns are a disgrace to all of us, but
if we closed 99 per cent. of them by Statute we should have the same
drunken crew left. While wandering far and wide over England, nothing
has struck me more than the steady resolution with which men will obtain
drink during prohibited hours; the cleverest administrator in the world
could not frame a network of clauses that could stop them; one might
close every drink-selling place in Britain, and yet those folks that had
a mind would get drink when they wanted it.
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