But at last it has come. After the most terrific efforts we
managed to get this nation stampeded, and for more than a
month now England has been dry. I wish you could have
witnessed the scenes, just like what we saw at home in
America, when it was known that the bill had passed. The
members of the House of Lords all stood up on their seats
and yelled, "Rah! Rah! Rah! Who's bone dry? We are!" And the
brewers and innkeepers were emptying their barrels of beer
into the Thames just as at St. Louis they emptied the beer
into the Mississippi.
I can't tell you with what pleasure I watched a group of
members of the Athenaeum Club sitting on the bank of the
Thames and opening bottles of champagne and pouring them
into the river. "To think," said one of them to me, "that
there was a time when I used to lap up a couple of quarts of
this terrible stuff every evening." I got him to give me a
few bottles as a souvenir, and I got some more souvenirs,
whiskey and liqueurs, when the members of the Beefsteak Club
were emptying out their cellars into Green Street; so when
you come over, I shall still be able, of course, to give you
a drink.
We have, as I said, been bone dry only a month, and yet
already we are getting the same splendid results as in
America. All the big dinners are now as refined and as
elevating and the dinner speeches as long and as informal as
they are in New York or Toronto. The other night at a dinner
at the White Friars Club I heard Sir Owen Seaman speaking,
not in that light futile way that he used to have, but quite
differently. He talked for over an hour and a half on the
State ownership of the Chinese Railway System, and I almost
fancied myself back in Boston.
And the working class too. It is just wonderful how
prohibition has increased their efficiency. In the old days
they used to drop their work the moment the hour struck. Now
they simply refuse to do so. I noticed yesterday a foreman
in charge of a building operation vainly trying to call the
bricklayers down. "Come, come, gentlemen," he shouted, "I
must insist on your stopping for the night." But they just
went on laying bricks faster than ever.
Of course, as yet there are a few slight difficulties and
deficiencies, just as there are with us in America. We have
had the same trouble with wood-alcohol (they call it
methylated spirit here), with the same deplorable results.
On some days the list of deaths is very serious, and in some
cases we are losing men we can hardly spare. A great many of
our leading actors--in fact, most of them--are dead. And there
has been a heavy loss, too, among the literary class and in
the legal profession.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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