Leadership Quote by William Lyon Mackenzie King

King’s “temperance” isn’t the cozy Victorian virtue of saying no to a second drink; it’s a managerial doctrine dressed up as moral hygiene. He frames restraint as a precondition for “services” being “employed” at maximum usefulness, a telling choice of words from a politician who governed during the long arc of industrial modernity, war mobilization, and the rise of the administrative state. People appear here less as citizens than as inputs: bodies calibrated to “physical capacity and ability,” deployed where they yield the best return.

The subtext is disciplinarian and technocratic. Temperance becomes a tool for smoothing the friction that inevitably comes with mass organization: fatigue, dissent, excess, and the private life that interferes with public productivity. By making the argument in the language of necessity - “essential,” “nothing less will assure” - King turns a contested moral and political demand into a neutral requirement, as if sobriety and self-control are simply the engineering standards of national efficiency.

Context matters: King’s Canada was negotiating labor unrest, social reform movements, and two world wars’ expectations of sacrifice. Temperance rhetoric had long been braided with class and gender policing, and his line nods to both “men and women” while quietly prescribing their optimal “effect” within a hierarchy of capability. “Total effort” is the kicker: it implies not just participation, but comprehensive mobilization - a nation asking for everything, and justifying the ask by translating virtue into output.