Temperance Items

Feilding Star, Volume XIV, Issue 115, 18 March 1893, Page 4

Temperance Items

At Auckland recently, at a licensed victuallers' dinner, Mr Stimpson, who returned thanks for the toast of 'The Trade,' made a curious assertion. He said that the present Licensing Act must have slipped through the House when most of the members were at Bellamy's. It was wont to be accepted as a certain truth that many of the worst results of whisky drinking would be avoided if only well matured whisky, of more than six years' standing, were drunk ; but it would appear, from the opinion of experts, that we must dismiss this also as one of the groundless imaginations of an unenlightened age. It seems that age makes no difference in the quality of the whisky for good or evil; it only improves its flavor. So that jDeople whose inclinations carry them in that direction tuny as j well begin with the whisky of this year as pay a high price for it on the assurance of the seller that it has been 20 years in bond. We have heard of a divine of the old school who assured his too bibulous people that all danger of evil consequences would certainly be avoided if only they made sure of the age of the generous liquor they consumed. It is almost a pity to see one more of the old beliefs of the past expire, and to discover that age makes no difference to the potency of whisky. Canon Wilberforce on being told that in having taken part ia the 'no compensation' demonstration in Hyde Park, London, he would have to stund j beside socialists who, if they had the ' opportunity, would destroy the very organisation to which he belonged, replied that he would rather see the temporalities and externals of the Church of England— for that was all anybody coulu touch — destroyed by the socialises than built up by the t;o---operatiou of tho iniquitous liq uor traffic. Ho would rather see their cathedrals and churches rot upoa the ground than built up by money amassed out of the blood of the nation.