LICENSING ACT.

Globe, Volume XXIV, Issue 2600, 7 August 1882, Page 3

LICENSING ACT.

To the Editor of the Qlobe,

Sxb, —The prohibitive clause has, in some instances where habitual drunkards hare had their liquor stopped, been productive of an immense amount of good. I know four or five prohibited persons who are now steady men from the operation of this clause alone, and who are as grateful for the change wrought in them as their families are and those with whom they are connected. It is a great blessing. What is wanted now ia to prohibit publicans from selling drink to children to carry out. The law, as it stands, prohibits the sale of drink to children for consumption by children, but anyone who has ever taken the trouble to follow the poor ragged little girls and boys from the public-houses carrying the half-hidden bottle in the kit is at no loss to account for the appalling number of drunken mothers. Within a stone’s throw of where I live I could point to half a dezen dwellings where squalid poverty and misery reigns from this cause alone, and I am confident that an amendment in the Act of the kind I mention would be most beneficial. Such a change in the Act is besides necessary to complete the work of the prohibitive clause against drunkards j for though some have per force become steady men, I know of instances where, by means of the kit and bottle and the hiring of a child to go to the public house, prohibition has been of no effect. Only to-day I saw a woman beastly drunk, who a month since was prohibited from being supplied. She sent the unsuspecting children for it, and of course, as the vendor puts it, “How was I to know who it was for ? ” Certainly not, say I, but so as to remove all doubts en that score, I would atop the serving of children altogether. Children have no business to besentto 4 ‘pubs” anyway. My next step would be to wipe out that blot in our code of institutions—the barmaid. It seems incredible that while we, as a community, profess a hatred and intolerance of anything tending to immorality, we are found winking at, aye supporting and

upholding, the employing of women in bars. Viewed from a publicans’ standpoint, I am sure they would lose nothing in the way of •access in their business by being prohibited from employing girls in their bars, and I don’t eicent the happy possessor of the “flanhest barmaid" ia the city. When I state this I do so with the experience of some years’ residence in a city a few times larger than Christchurch, and where there were a few hundred more bars conducted solely by barmen. Nobody, absolutely nobody, not even the oldest inhabitant, the man who is credited with knowing everything, will contend that a bar is a fit business for a female to conduct, and especially a young female, while everybody possessing the smallest claim to respectability does consider it is “no place ” for a girl to be employed in. Then why not stop it ? Yours, &0., PROHIBITION,