A Good Glass of Drink.

Feilding Star, Volume XVII, Issue 224, 25 March 1896, Page 3

A Good Glass of Drink.

A PRESBYTERIAN MINISTER SAYS IT DOES NO HARM. There was a lively debate at the meeting of the Presbyterian Assembly in Melbourne the other afternoon on the subject of the drink traffic. The Rev J. Milne, having submitted a motion in favour of the introduction of tne Gothenburg system of State control of the liquor traffic, the Rev. D. Allen, speaking apparently with the approval of the majority of those present said he saw no advantage in submitting the matter to the Government. It was not whisky that was ruining the people but embrocation and painkiller sold dilated with water to shearers and bush workers, who overcome with the loneliness and miseries of their existance, come into town when the feeling of depression became so strong that they could not bear it longer, and were driven to drown their miseries by knocking down their cheques. It was not good drink that was doing the harm, he repeated, but hocassed liquor. Two glasses of honest liquor, he said, would not harm any man. (Laughter and applause.) If they had proper inspection of liquor, and if the Licensing Act were enforced as it should be, drunkenness would very largely be reduced. Drnnkenness was as often caused by poverty as poverty by drunkenness. It was not poverty that killed men, but hopeless poverty. Teetotallers could do a great deal more for their cause if they were not so unreasonable. He had often tried to go with teetotallers, though he had never been one, but when he went to them he found them BO terrible crabbed, craDky and unreliable tbat he had to seek other company. If you went into a teetotaller's house you could not get up without antimacassars sticking to your coat tails. Their houses seemed made to look at, not to live in. (Cries of order.) You could not smoke, you could not wink, you could not do anything. Ordinary people found it hard to keep the ten commandments, but instead of 10 the teetotallers had instituted 10,000. The Venerable Dr Geikie said the intemperance of its advocates waa ruiniog the cause of temperance, the greatest enemies of which were the men who were always talking about it. (Dissent and applause.) There should be an association formed to promote the Gothenburg system, but the New South Wales i_ej?islature was certainly not a body to which he would go with a scheme to put down drunkenness. (Laughter.) After further discussion, a motion in favour of introducing *be Gothenburg system was carried by 30 to 27, and a deputation was appointed to wait on the Premier and present it to him.