War & Peace Quote by William Lyon Mackenzie King

King’s line reads like a dry ledger entry, but it’s really a warning shot dressed as bookkeeping. By choosing the calm language of “steady increase,” “estimated,” and “dollar volume,” he avoids the moralistic scolding you’d expect in a temperance-era speech and instead frames drinking as a national indicator, a barometer of strain. The numbers do the judging for him. “Practically double” lands with the blunt force of an audit: not an anecdote about rowdy soldiers, but a macroeconomic fact that implies a moral and political problem without naming it outright.

Context matters. As Canada absorbed the shocks of the First World War - casualties, rationing, inflation, social dislocation - alcohol became both escape and commodity. King, a politician steeped in social reform debates of the early 20th century, is speaking into a moment when prohibition wasn’t fringe; it was policy on the table, already enacted in various provinces and hotly contested as a tool of wartime discipline and postwar “national efficiency.”

The subtext is that war doesn’t just consume bodies and budgets; it reshapes private behavior. By emphasizing “our country,” King turns personal vice into collective vulnerability, inviting voters to see alcohol not as harmless pleasure but as leakage in the national system - money diverted, productivity dulled, families strained. It’s political persuasion via statistics: a sober sentence engineered to make intoxication sound expensive, unpatriotic, and newly urgent.