2 
THE ALCOHOL PROBLEM 
of sale of alcoholic liquors cannot be allowed to remain 
indefinitely in their present unsatisfactory state. If 
we make no move on our own initiative, we may be 
compelled to do so sooner or later as the result of 
pressure from outside. If, as is confidently stated 
by many temperance advocates, the adoption of 
complete prohibition causes a striking improvement in 
the health, happiness and efficiency of the inhabitants 
of a country, and we find that so far as concerns 
industrial efficiency we are really being beaten in the 
competition for world trade by a rival nation which 
has adopted it, we may be driven, in a panic, to in- 
troduce extreme and unsuitable measures which have 
to be subsequently withdrawn. If, on the other hand, 
by a careful study of the progress of reform move- 
ments in other countries we are sufficiently alert to 
recognise in what respects they are successful and 
wherein they fail, and to apply this information to our 
own country, we may save ourselves a vast amount 
of wasted energy and disappointment. 
We want to foresee, so far as we can, the stage which 
the alcohol problem will reach in 50 or 100 years’ time, 
and by suitable legislative and other means to attain it 
with the minimum of friction and misdirected effort. 
We are not at all likely to avoid every pitfall, but each 
one that we can avoid will be so much to the good. 
The primary difficulty lies in the intelligent anticipation 
of the future course of the alcohol problem, as it 
concerns ourselves and other civilised countries, and 
in this book I have discussed the various directions 
in which progress is being made, and have endeavoured 
to assess their relative degrees of importance in the 
removal or reduction of the evils associated with the