War & Peace Quote by William Lyon Mackenzie King

A statistic delivered with the chill of a ledger can still be a moral argument. Mackenzie King’s line about “three and a half million proof gallons” isn’t trying to paint a scene; it’s trying to establish culpability. By anchoring alcohol consumption to “the twelve months immediately preceding the outbreak of war,” he frames drinking not as a private vice but as a national condition on the eve of catastrophe. The timing is the point: this is a portrait of a society allegedly soft, distracted, or undisciplined right before it’s asked to sacrifice.

King was a politician of administration and social engineering, and the sentence reads like governance-as-therapy. “Released for sale” is bureaucratic phrasing that quietly shifts attention from individual drinkers to systems of permission: markets, regulation, the state’s complicity. Even “both domestic and imported” widens the net, suggesting the problem is not a quaint local habit but an entire supply chain, a modern economy feeding appetite. It’s temperance rhetoric dressed in actuarial clothing.

The subtext is political leverage. In wartime (and in the debates around wartime), numbers like these become ammunition for rationing, prohibition measures, or tighter control of leisure in the name of efficiency and patriotism. King doesn’t need to shout; the sheer mass of the figure is meant to do the scolding for him. It’s an early example of a now-familiar tactic: using data to launder a cultural judgment into something that looks inevitable, objective, and urgent.