Success Quote by William Lyon Mackenzie King

King’s line is a masterclass in political insinuation: he opens with a scrupulous disclaimer, then quietly plants the very association he claims to avoid. “I would not wish to imply” performs moral restraint while doing the work of accusation. It’s the rhetorical version of washing your hands before touching the evidence.

The subtext is clear enough: industrial accidents may not be “mostly” caused by drinking, but if we talk about temperance in the same breath as workplace injury, the public is invited to see alcohol as the hidden villain. That framing shifts attention away from the more expensive, more politically fraught culprits: unsafe machinery, long hours, lax enforcement, and employers who’d rather pay compensation after the fact than prevent harm. In one tidy sentence, responsibility slides from industry to the worker’s character.

Context matters. King came of age as Canada industrialized and as temperance was not just a personal ethic but an organized, vote-moving crusade, often linked to Protestant moral reform and a broader project of “disciplining” the working class. By positioning temperance as a fail-safe reducer of accidents, King offers a policy that is socially legible and politically convenient: it’s cheaper than regulation, flatteringly “common sense,” and it can be sold as compassion for families without confronting corporate power head-on.

The genius (and the cynicism) is the claim’s unfalsifiability. “Temperance has never failed” can absorb any outcome: if accidents drop, temperance gets credit; if they don’t, the implication is that workers weren’t temperate enough. That’s governance by moral accounting, not industrial accountability.