FINLAND: Beelzebub v. Satan

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A disgrace to the Government of Premier Sunila and a blow to Temperance, most Finnish editors angrily agreed last week, was the first price list of 200 tasty drinkables issued by Finland's State Liquor Stores just 86-days after the country voted down Prohibition.

Instead of pricing hard liquor up to discourage hard drinking, the Government priced it down. Instead of pricing light wines down it priced them up.

In Helsinki, though editorial pages roasted the Government, great and jubilant headlines heralded the arrival last week of hard liquor (the kind Finns like) in huge quantities. Cried the Most Reverend Archbishop Ingman: '"Not even the first cargoes of American grain which arrived in starving Finland at Christmas time in 1918 aroused such excitement as these present imports of 'legal liquor' into a country already full of illegal liquor. . . . Touching the assertion that the State will derive some benefit from these liquor sales it is my solemn duty to warn the Finnish people against attempting to employ Beelzebub to expel Satan."

That, precisely, was what Premier Sunila was trying to do last week by offering the public hardest liquor at cut rates. He hoped to undercut, ruin and drive out of Finland her entrenched and wealthy liquor smugglers.

From now on it will be Beelzebub against Satan until smuggling ceases and the Government obtains an. actual liquor monopoly — after which hard liquor prices will be upped, consumption of light wines encouraged in Finland (as in Sweden).