Humiliation Day for Drunkenness.

Hawke's Bay Times, Issue 1581, 2 June 1874, Page 238

Humiliation Day for Drunkenness.

Ate town of Rugely (says the Western Morning News) has been keeping a day of humiliation on account of the drunkenness of the place. If the cause were always followed by the Jsame effect the day of humiliation would be universal throughout England. Rugely is not, so far as we are aware, drunken above all the other towns of England. But it chances to have a vicar who. instead of troubling himself about dossajs and facing east on the oue hand, or horns and frogs on the other, has been preaching and lecturing against intemperance, and thus realizing what a good many of us believe to be the chief mission of the English clergy—that of crusaders against sins, and teachers of pure morals. That the vicar has not labored in vain is proved by the fact that the services pn his, clay of humiliation were thronged, and that some of the publichouses have been closed. In default' of any Act of Parliament by which the ratepayers may decide if the others shall be closed, Lord Lichfield, who is a large landowner in Rugely, means to shut every public-house of which he is the landlord. This is the Permissive Bill, and a good deal more. Yet we do not hoar that anyone is resisting Lord Lichfield's will or denying his right to deal with his property as he likes. It is tyranny—at least, so we are told—for two-thirds of the ratepayers in a town to close the drink-shops; but no one says it tyranny for oue man to dq so—.albeit he is not even a resident in the town. No one asks, then, what is to become of the " poor man" when he is " robbed of his beer." Perhaps the reason is because everyone well knows that without the beer there would be no " poor man.". The Okarito Road Board, Westland, is about having a line blazed from the FiveMile Beach to some agricultural land in the back country. The members appear very sanguine about a goldrield being opened out along this track. At Hunt's Beach, Westland, there has been a squabble over an abandoned race. It appears firearms were brought into requisition on the occasion. This style of argument seems to be growing in favor j« the district.

I Moving House.— l wish we could manage it as they do in America, at least as the tenants of woolen houses there do. There I have met a residence with twenty six windows in it quietly stroling along the street from one part of the city to another. Talk of moving house! That is exactly ' what one does not do here, when the neccs gity arises for the movement of the householders. The phrase is a provoking misnomer, inasmuch as nothing resents movement like a house and its .belongings. The way in which things fit themselves into rooms, and almost grow into part of the building, is inconceivable till you have to shift them. And the air of disconsolate shabbiness which furniture, "supposed to be respectable, assumes the movement it is shifted for removal, must also be witnessed to be believed. The height, or rather depth, of its apparent dilapidation, however, appears when it is fairly turned out of doors, and stands by the area rails, waiting for the men in white aprons to hoist it into the van. A sofa or a pet arm-chair thus appears like a friend in the. shabbiest distress. »You know it intimately, but you are almost ashamed to own it. Then the way in which things, long severed in fact and in association, get thrown together, is most bewildering. A bottle-jack is never meant to be set under a piano, or, though they are both made of the same metal, a frying-pan to be rested on an iron bedstead. This last collocation iu my own case made one think of St. Lawrence. Those cross bars on which the lower mattress is laid would do excellently to grill a malefactor, I never thought ofithat before. The frying-pan suggested it. Altogether, the jumble of kitchen and dining-room belongings is not so very incongruous, for there is so frequent a traffic between these two departments that the resident families of furniture in each must come to know a good deal about one another ; but when the inside of the drawing-room descends to consort with the scullery, and bed furniture gets mixed tip with Ihe plate-rack, when dish-covers repose on pillows, and the whole little mob of "portable property," as Mr Wcmmick calls it, stands about the outside of the street door, shamelessly exhibiting the inside of your household to theheedless passer-by, and to the inevitable boy who insists on presiding on such occasions, and conveys his opinion to his juniors, the sense of possesion and discriminate arrangement gets to be sorely entangled. One sees the operations of communistic principle in this domestic jumble. Everything is in its wrong place; Pots and pans ride in the same carriage with their betters, and the barriers of social furniture are leveled. The house itself, too, is invaded by men who make the merest pretence of taking off their hats or wiping their shoes, invaded, did I say ! Sacked ; taken by assault. Strangers jostle you in your most sacred retreats. Men on whom you have never set your eyes before walk into your sanctum, and shoiilder your treasures without apology.—Leisure Hour.