REPLY TO FAIR PLAY.

Feilding Star, Volume XV, Issue 57, 5 September 1893, Page 2

REPLY TO FAIR PLAY.

id thjs KUixuit OF THE STAR. Sir, — I regret that your correspondent " Fair Play " did not succeed in putting his remarks, on the revenue question, in a more concise and grammatical form, so that a person of ordinary intelligence might be able to clearly grasp the ideas he means to convey. He takes for granted that temperance people will try to shirk paying their share of the revenue when prohibition is obtained, and therefore seeks to compel them to do so ;in his haste to deal a blow at temperance advocates, he has omitted to ascertain whether they are realy desirous of putting the burden of taxation on other people's shoulders, so that he has simply set up a man of straw in order to be able to knock him down again. A little investigation would have shown him that the yearly drink bill for the colony amounts to over £3 per head, including abstainers (the average, taking non-abstainers only, would, of course be much higher) and therefore the effect of prohibition would be to take a very grevious tax oft' the nonabstainers and thereby to put an extra, though by no means so heavy a one, on abstainers. For at present the thinking portion of the population of the colony, and those engaged in the traffic, tax themselves to the extent of over two millions per anuutn, and in doing so contribute half a million to the revenue ; but if prohibition was carried out two millious of direct expenditure would be saved to the already too heavily taxed non-abstainiug taxpayer, while a more direct tax of fourteen shillings and threepence per head could then be imposed to raise the half million that is now received from the drink traffic, and such a tax would reach the abstainers, " agitators and voters " who now escape so lightly. I shall not enlarge on the fact, (though a very important one) that drink being the cause of a vast amount of crimo and poverty and in that way leading to a great deal of expenditure on gaols, hospitals, asylums, etc., not nearly so much revenue would then bo required as at present. With regard to tho revenue derived by Local Bodies from licence fees, does "Fair Play" know that the people in a town of the size of Feilding spend in drink the sum of £5,000 per annum and receiye in return only £160 of revenue, and a harvest of poverty, crime, and social and moral legradation ? And has he everrealized that a direct tax of 2s per head would raise the same amount of revenue, •cithout the above-named harvest '? i'hat revenue should be derived from

that which is aUuuitea to ow uin source of three-fourths of all the crime, poverty and misery in the land, is a foul blot on our civilization aud a disgrace to auy Christian-professing community. I am, etc., W. JonxsToxß. Feilding, September 4tb, 1893.