RUSSIA'S EXPERIMENT IN TEMPERANCE REFORM.
By S.
RUSSIA has demonstrated what American municipalities are still unwilling to believe, that temperance can not be promoted by any kind of compromise with the liquor business. She has gone into the liquor business, and undertaken the supervision of the distribution and sale of the liquor, all in the interest of temperance. The government has 400 distilleries, from the product of which it estimates an income for the current year of $195,000,000. The government has direct control of every place where this liquor is sold. The temperance feature of the program is that the liquor must be sold in sealed bottles, and must not be drunk “on the premises.” This new “temperance measure” has been working long enough to have demonstrated whether it has a right to be called such. George Kennan, writing in an impartial way of the working of this system, has the following to say in The Outlook of January 11:— Correspondents of Russian newspapers, in all parts of the country, report that street-drunkenness has everywhere increased; that many of the tea-shops, libraries, and reading-rooms [places designed by the government to take the place of the saloon as a meeting-place for former frequenters of the saloon] reported to the central government, exist only on paper; that the temperance bureaus are inert, unwieldy organizations, into which the breath of life has never yet been breathed; and that private enterprises in the temperance field have been discouraged, if not completely paralyzed, by official red-tape, formalism, over-regulation, and suspicion. The government is making money out of the undertaking. It is also making drunkards, with the necessary result that it will make more money, and then more drunkards, and then more money, and so on ad infinitum. The Russian Government is greatly in need of money. It is fairly coining it now out of the appetites of its people. The measure seems to have been successful as a “business enterprise;” but as a temperance measure it has utterly failed, as it was bound to do. Regulation of a wicked thing will never make it righteous. Compromise with evil has always been the synonym for surrender of principle to “expediency.” Every compromise with the liquor traffic—call it license, high license, regulation, government supervision, or what you will—has been a distinct gain to the wicked business always, and always will be. The regulation of the rum business in Russia has demonstrated that temperance is not attained in that way; that its interests are not advanced by that method; but debauchery is the price which the community pays for the government's financial experiment in temperance reform. And it has been and will be just as true of any attempt at its regulation even by professed Christians in the professed interests of temperance reform through Sunday closing or any similarly delusive measure. S.