Leadership Quote by William Lyon Mackenzie King

A politician’s way of blaming the bottle on the budget, Mackenzie King’s line is a crisp piece of wartime moral accounting: if the state floods the economy with money, it shouldn’t be shocked when citizens spend some of it on escape. The phrasing does a lot of work. “Very largely” softens the claim into something that sounds empirical rather than scolding. “Direct result” snaps it back into causality, nudging listeners toward a policy solution: treat drinking as an economic byproduct to be managed, not merely a private vice to be condemned.

The context matters: wartime spending supercharges employment and wages, loosens household austerity, and concentrates stress in the same moment. King frames rising alcohol consumption as the predictable shadow of mobilization. It’s a subtle form of political self-protection. If the government must spend to fight, and spending brings social side effects, then leaders can justify new controls (taxation, rationing, licensing, temperance measures) without admitting that the war itself is grinding people down. The subtext: the nation’s moral temperature can’t be regulated by sermons alone; it must be engineered through purchasing power and supply.

There’s also a quiet class and gender politics embedded here. “Increased purchasing power” points to workers and soldiers with cash in hand, implying that newly empowered consumers are newly unruly. King’s intent is less to empathize than to domesticate: map disorder onto economics, then claim the right to manage both.