One terrible truth remains to be told of the crime of drink against the Red Cross. The most blessed thing in all the world today is alcohol, for it makes chloroform and ether, which soothe the pain of men. We cannot get enough of either of these consoling drugs, yet we go on wasting precious food to make more alcohol _to add to the sum of misery and pain_. Will some Member of Parliament please ask =whether the bread ration applies equally to all; or if it may be exceeded if the excess is drunk instead of being eaten?= and =how many brewers’ vats have been imported this year on ships which had no room for urgent munitions of war?= ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Stabbing the Army in the Back All the world is learning now that the drink trade is the great confederate of venereal disease. It leads a man into temptation, destroys his power of resistance, and retards his chances of recovery. We can never know the truth about the extent of this disease, about the way in which the liquor trade, by breaking down tens of thousands of our men, has stabbed the Army in the back. But the number of soldiers incapacitated by this disease through drink is enormously greater than the number incapacitated by the most subtle or dramatic stroke devised by the German staff. The lost man-power of the Army through this disease must be equal to the whole of the original British Expeditionary Force. The Government has given us figures for the Army at home last year, and they are 43 per 1,000—or over 100,000 cases for an army of 2,500,000 men. There were 7,000 cases in one Canadian camp alone. Here are the black facts revealed in a debate in Parliament on April 23, 1917, when two distinguished Army officers, speaking with great restraint, sought to open the eyes of the nation to this plague fostered in our camps by drink: “During the war we have had admitted into the hospitals of England over 70,000 cases of gonorrhœa, over 20,000 cases of syphilis, and over 6000 cases of another disease somewhat similar. I am quite openly prepared to state that of these 20,000 cases of syphilis you do not get much work out of them under two and a half years. I know from what I have seen of the modern conditions of this War that you may absolutely wipe them out, except for a few handfuls. “When you come to the great mass of casualties under this head ... the figures mean that you have =a Division constantly out of action=. If you have anything like 70,000 men enfeebled, you find that you suffer to that extent also. It is not only that you lose the men, and not only the men who are partially cured are suffering for many months to come, but their chances of recovery from wounds are not nearly so good.