Startling Indictment

Hokitika Guardian, 16 December 1919, Page 2

Startling Indictment

Bishop Cleary Speaks Out. (From a Special correspondent.) WELLINGTON, December 15. Tile recent issue of Auckland’6 Roman Catholic magazine, “The Month” lias just arrived in Wellington, and one of the most surprising features in a powerful editorial by His Lordship, Dr Cleary, Catholic Bishop of Auckland. Dealing with the forthcoming poll on prohibition, one of the paragraphs is headed “Human Wreckage.” Dr Cleary writes thus regarding the liquor trade: “Herein lies one of the tragedies “of the traffic in intoxicating “drink; the antagonism between “the monetary interests of a “large section of “the Trade” “and the welfare of the individu“al and the nation. In No Mans “Land, close in front of the “trenches, where t served as a “military chaplain, there laid the “the piled up or scattered bodies “ —all unburied—of over three “thousand gallant colonial “storm troops that had been “destroyed bv a sudden whirl“wind of fire from the nearby “German lines. That moving “spectacle of battered bodies ‘ ‘does not represent a tithe of the “human wreckage left all over “this Dominion, by the sins of “a considerable section of “The “Trade”, whom neither moral “suasion nor the civil law, nor “the appeal of pity, has been “able to bring within control, “and the less the appeal is to “conscience in “The Trade” the “more must the State rely for “reform upon its power and “right of repressing a traffic, the “evils of which it has hopelessly failed to reduce to the “limits of tolerance or modera“tion.” “As to the right of a State to “suppress the liquor traffic,” said the great Catholic, Archbishop Spalding, “there can be “no question since the right to ‘‘suppress -crime involves the right I “to suppress its chief cause.” It. is the sins and the sinmaking and crime attendant upon the operations of “The Trade” that have created the movement for its abolition; they have furnished it .with its chief driving force; they have made it (in our personal view) a wholesome necessity in a land that would give its best to the shaping of the new. and better era, that is (we hope) at hand.” (Published by Arrangement),