The Guardian And Evening Star, with which is incorporated the West Coast Times. WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 1, 1928.

Hokitika Guardian, 1 August 1928, Page 2

The Guardian And Evening Star, with which is incorporated the West Coast Times. WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 1, 1928.

THE PROHIBITION PROBLEM. The United States has had the experience of prohibition now for a considerable period. It lias been long enough established to create something of a problem for the nation. Such a development is interesting to this country where from time to time there is ail appeal to the people to adopt prohibition. As it is as well to study the question from all angles, not the least interesting and instructive is the problem a rising in tlie States to wliicli the people from different sources arc being asked to face frankly. In a Chicago business publication before us, there is the call to the nation to study the new situation which is arising. There is says one writer, a growing tendency, and fortunately so, on the part of our more conservative and thoughtful writers and speakers, to define the real problem which National Prohibition now presents to the people of the United States, and to seek for that problem a rational solution. Two recent expressions are typical and striking examples of this tendency. The first quotation given is that of the editor of Town and Country Club News, Cleveland, who closes a sane discussion of the question thus: “Prohibition is no longer a question of getting a drink there is notoriously as much as ever but a question, as it always has been, of good .government or bad. When the wave of intemperate thinking and talking on the subject has sufficiently receded, the real question will be first disclosed and then undertaken with a view to settlement.” This is a frank expression of things, as they are, and the admission must be noted, as we have been told so often by visitors and travellers to the United States, that there is as much drink as ever in the country—though it is a professedly prohibition territory. The other writer quoted of domestic America is Mr E. S. Martin, whose editorial page in “Life” is notable for its restraint and sweet reasonableness, and who attacks the problem in much tho same way, as follows: “Somehow we must get rid of the notion that the question of Prohibition in the Constitution is primarily a rum question. We shall never be quit of the Eighteenth Amendment by the action of voters who are mainly concerned with what they shall get to drink. That is a secondary matter. The real issue is not there. Dr Butler sees that as he showed when he said in his Missouri speech that the reform for which there is such imperative need must be brought about by ‘total abstainers who realise that a terrible mistake has been made; that instead of building character, we have torn it down ; that instead of promoting public honesty, we have mutiplied political hypocrisy.’ ” This is a sweeping condemnation of prohibition from inside which is worth pondering over. Having noted the opinions thus quoted, the Chicago writer goes on to expound the situation for his readers. He sums up the position in the following trenchant way: “We need better rum laws, not to save our drinks, but to save our national character, which is now going the gait of the Gadarene swine. The real problem now facing

the poeple of this country (the United States) is not Prohibition, not the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act, but temperance—and it involves not only sane and effective control of the use of alcohol, but good government, good citizenship, social order, and laws that express the majority will of the peoeple, faithfully and impartially administered. Wluit we need is Temperance, not only in our desires and habits, but in our collective efforts to control our desires and habits for our own good and for the good of the people in general. The real problem should make a powerful appeal, as Dr Butler sav-., to the total abstainer, to everyone who believes in temperance and tries to live temperately. Surely it would be found that the whole body of these would be more numerous, more powerful—if combined for a single purpose—that the Prohibition fanatics and the irrationally in-tempe-rato who have been responsible for a condition of distinct menace to the moral, social and political welfare of the people of the United States.” There is certainly‘food for thought in the above exposition of the prohibition situation in tho United States, and as New Zealand will shortly he deciding its lot at the ballot box in regard to prohibition, tho opinions recorded above might well he studied in the meantime.