Leadership Quote by William Lyon Mackenzie King

King’s sentence sounds like a moral lecture dressed up as logistical common sense, and that’s exactly the point. By framing temperance as a self-evident “advantage” to the armed forces, he turns a contested social crusade into a matter of national efficiency. The phrasing “there can be no doubt in the world” isn’t evidence; it’s a rhetorical quarantine. If doubt is impossible, disagreement becomes not merely wrong but unserious, even disloyal.

The specific intent is twofold: discipline the troops and reassure the home front. In wartime and in the tense interwar years, governments sold sobriety as readiness - fewer accidents, sharper judgment, tighter unit cohesion. But King’s choice to emphasize “training” reveals the deeper aim: temperance as conditioning, a way to manufacture the reliable citizen-soldier. Alcohol here isn’t just a personal vice; it’s a threat to the chain of command and, by extension, the state’s authority.

The subtext also reads domestically political. Canada’s temperance movement had real electoral muscle, especially in Protestant and reform-minded circles. King, a master of cautious coalition-building, could signal virtue without picking a direct fight over prohibition’s failures and backlash. He sidesteps the messy policy debate by relocating the argument to the barracks, where “benefits” sound practical rather than puritanical.

What makes the line work is its bureaucratic certainty: it narrows a complex cultural struggle into a simple axiom. That’s politics at its most effective - not persuading you, but preempting the need to persuade at all.