Welsh Journals

THE MORAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE LIQUOR TRADE "AM I MY BROTHER'S KEEPER?" M ANY Temperance Reformers are genuinely frightened at the idea of the State Purchase of the Drink Traffic, lest it involve them as citizens in the moral contamination which attaches to the trade in intoxicants. Such people are, or ought to be, themselves total abstainers. They have felt it their duty to themselves, to society, to God, or to all three, to deny themselves whatever satisfac- tion there might be in drinking in the most moderate degree. For the man who drinks to the most moderate extent cannot feel that supplying him involves any moral blame. As a rule, the sense of consistency in the total abstainers requires him to avoid also any share in causing others to drink. One has indeed known the teetotal publican and brewer and shareholder in the trade, but their abstinence is generally admired more for its prudence than as a high moral principle. The man who on moral or religious grounds abstains from drinking intoxicants will equally desire others to observe the same principle, and therefore will not be a party to providing intoxicants for others. And the policy known as State Purchase seems to him to involve him in quite a new way in the responsibility and guilt for manufacturing and providing liquor. But this conclusion and the feeling of repugnance to the policy that attends it, are the result of abstract and rather confused thinking. In the first place, it fails to distinguish between the individual's responsibility where he is free to act in direct obedience to his personal con- victions, and his responsibility as a member of society, where his action is necessarily qualified by his solidarity. with his social environment. Whether a man drinks or abstains is entirely a matter for himself to decide, and his personal responsibility for his action here is direct and complete. But where he acts with the community of which he finds himself a member, and upon social con- ditions already existing, as in the case of the drink problem, the question of liberty and responsibility is not so simple. If he is a member of a Church, as a rule he is obliged to countenance a less stringent standard of temperance than total abstinence, which few churches have made into a condition of membership. In Society and the State a man every act is a compromise between his own ideal and his ability to influence his fellows, and they are many, while he is one. By abstinence, opposition and protest, it may be possible to minimise one's responsibility for the evils of his social surroundings, but who would say that he has ever done all that he could towards the end. By living in society, in a thousand ways we acquiesce, consent and profit by the totality of its actual conditions. Social solidarity is so intimate and mighty a factor in life that few people will, after consideration, wash their hands, and say that having protested, they no longer participate in any way in the res- ponsibility for so general a feature of the life of the com- munity as the drink traffic. The doctrine of original sin is not altogether false. Man is not an atom, but an organ, in society. It is not maintained that the distinction between individual and social responsibility is absolute, but it is a. broad distinction that needs to be observed. When people are first brought face to face with the idea of nationalising the drink traffic, they rightly recognize that it involves moral responsibility, and they fear that somehow they will be individually involved in some new way in the guilt of the drink traffic. It would be well to recognize that this is responsibility, not where one is free to act as he likes, but rather in a sphere where community and compromise of ideas and actions are a condition of life. In the second place, there is much confusion of thought as to the precise bearing of State Purchase upon Social responsibility. It is easier to visualise responsibility in a fresh act or in new conditions than in the existing state of things. We find on the one hand a tendency to ex- aggerate the difference that nationalisation would make in the matter of responsibility, and on the other a failure to appreciate the fact that a deliberate and purposeful responsibility is on a higher and healthier moral level than the responsibility of acquiescence and drift. People employ the abstract terms of the Stock Exchange and of the market-place, and then invest them with a moral meaning which is altogether alien to them. They become victims of the logical fallacy of Equivocation. They use terms with two entirely different meanings, and draw their conclusions as if both meanings were the same. In the region of legal title and mercantile exchange terms like purchase and ownership denote a definite, complete transaction and relation, but in the larger world of reality and moral relations their significance is not so definite or simple. Legally, purchase means the absolute transfer of a commodity from one party to another, but in moral facts, such a transfer is barely possible in respect even of the most trivial and worthless things. Ownership in law is a simple, exclusive and absolute relation of a person to a property but morally no such relation is possible between a person and his property that he exhausts its proprietary qualities or that it excludes all others from any relation to it. Outside legal fiction, there is no such thing as absolute ownership. I can do as I like with my own was never anything better than a vain boast or a futile claim, and it becomes less and less true as the moral interdependence of men is realised. All ownership is qualified on the one side by the limited ability of the owner to enjoy, owing to shortness of life, defective capacity, and the like and on the other side by the claims of others, of society and the State upon all property. A landowner owns his land only to the extent that he is able to cultivate it, and to enjoy it, and then on the tacit or explicit condition that he so uses it that others may enjoy it. A man who buys a book only owns it to the extent that he can assimilate its contents, and then, in common with all others who can equally assimilate it. All owner-