THE DRINK QUESTION.

Globe, Volume XXIII, Issue 2172, 10 February 1881, Page 3

THE DRINK QUESTION.

[communicated.] The aotion a woman named Cain took at Lyttelton the other day in order to prevent a publican from serving her husband with drink, while novel in its way, was one which, in the absence of cooler judgment on the part of the woman, may be to a great extent excused. It appears that she was suffering from an infliction of the kind whioh comes under the head of helpless, drunken husbands, and she, having exhausted, as she thought, every legal channel, adopted one of her own notion. She first reoonnoitered the enemy's camp, and found its exact looation]to be an hotel in her own immediate neighborhood. Following this, she cautioned the keeper of the place against heaping coals of fire on her and her children's heads by giving alchoholio drink to her "never half." Upon subsequently finding that her appeal was unheeded, she armed herself with " pebbles from the brook," and bombarded the bar, in wbioh she saw her husband sitting. Had she lived in some parts of the planet other than New Zealand, she would nave been saved from going to suoh trouble, and from the humiliation of a Court scene and a fine suoh as she had to meet. For men of the Cain stripe—soakers who are a curse to themselves, and a disgrace and a nuisance to every person immediately connected with them, by reason of their besottedness—a very opportune clause is inserted in some Licensing Acts, under whioh Mrs Cain would have had but to satisfy the police authorities of her respectability, and the bona fides of her grievance, and through them have notified the liquor sellers in the town of Cain's prohibition. The penalty would then be on the publican, and the disgrace on the prohibited individual, whose name must be kept exposed in all the grog-selling plaoes and the public house bars for three months following the notice. Be it conoeded that it is beyond the power of an Aot of Parliament to make either this class of men temperate, or rogues honest, yet the Act referred to makes the exercise of the drunkard's passions more difficult, and that is surely something gained.