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Hand-corrected typed manuscript of a lecture entitled "The Drink Question," nine pages, 8 x 10, signed at the head in fountain pen, "This may pass as corrected; but the reported badly needs seven years training in verbatim reporting. G.B.S., 9/12/31." Shaw makes extensive corrections to a transcript of his lecture on temperance, noting: "This is the first time I have ever taken the Drink Question as my subject." He writes over 150 words throughout, correcting the draft and deleting large passages of text.
He begins by comparing the American experiment in Prohibition with Soviet Russia, arguing that in the United States the “direct results” of Prohibition may have been “satisfactory,” but that its indirect effects were disastrous: it created a vast bootlegging industry, “miniature Trafalgars between the bootleggers and the authorities,” and a climate in which police, courts, and officials were corrupted or intimidated. The real American question, he says, is not simply liquor but civilization itself: “Are you going to be beaten by the liquor trade?” At the opposite extreme, Shaw describes Russia, where he claims illegal profiteering and gangsterism are suppressed with ruthless efficiency, but where prohibition failed for a different reason: people deprived of drink “will make it for themselves,” producing dangerous homemade spirits. Russia’s solution, as he presents it, was to supply regulated vodka rather than leave people to “distil in secret their own horrible and poisonous concoctions.”
Shaw’s ultimate argument is that temperance cannot be achieved merely by closing public houses or banning alcohol. The “fundamental cure,” he writes in revision, is “to destroy the desire for drink—to make men ashamed of having to rely on drink for courage and happiness.” He rejects the usual moralistic warnings that drink will inevitably ruin a man, admitting that many drinkers do not lose “self-respect,” “money,” or “reputation,” and that some seem “to preserve themselves in alcohol.” Instead, he reframes drink as a psychological and spiritual dependence, especially mocking “Dutch courage,” or the “false valour” produced by rum. The goal, he says, is to teach people that “the power of calling into existence courage and happiness is within them,” not dependent on “outside artificial stimulants.” His closing thought is characteristically severe: anyone who cannot get along without drink reveals a mind “turned downwards,” while the broader social task is to make temperance “a reality” by changing desire rather than merely enforcing law. In fine condition, with some scattered light foxing, rusty paperclip impressions to the upper left corner, and the first and last pages detached from the staple.
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