THE RACIAL ASPECT OF PROHIBITION

Hokitika Guardian, 6 October 1928, Page 7

THE RACIAL ASPECT OF PROHIBITION

(Sydney Bulletin). There are races which take kindly to regimentation. If Mussolini ordered the Italians to abstain from wine they would obey without audible complaint. They are already abstaining on certain days from macaroni, in the interests of the national ricegrowing industry; and they smoke the world’s worst tobacco and eat the world’s worst salt, and utter no protests, because tobacco and salt are the monopolies of their Government. The docility of the average American, his readiness to bow to any form of official tyranny is a matter for comment. He and his countrymen are more standardised, from their culture to their clothes, than any race the world has known. Thus ho was cut out by nature to make the Prohibition experiment; and maybe, after a desperate struggle which only the richest people in history could face with equanimity, he will make a partial success of it. Australians are' not a bit like that. They succeeded as soldiers largely because of their intense individualism. They only submitted to standardisation as a measure of desperation. Battle discipline was almost the only soi-t of discipline they knew. No virtue is here claimed for this idiosyncrasy. A dictator benevolent or otherwise, a Mussolini, could make any great Australian city a far more seemly and creditable spectacle than it is—if Australian city dwellers were like those of Italy. He might sweep every merchant, tout and drunk off the streets, and intern every prostitute in a suburra as Mussolini has done in Home. The citizens would feel happier and more comfortable in one sense ; but, assuming they retained any trace of Australianism, they would feel profoundly uncomfortable in another. They would insist that the price was too big. The British race, which is rather better represented in White Australia at the present time than it is in cosmopolitan and nigger-infested has never got anywhere either socially or politically by means of coup d’etat. The English have had few revolutions in the last 900 years, and none of them has-acted as more than a temporary check on the steady leisurely flow of the life of the people. It is their way to hasten slowly, and to view as a quack the fluent optimist who promises to make them moral, sober and wealthy by one splendid Act of (Parliament. TJjiey a l- e growing soberer every year—a' fact which is amply confirmed by the police and medical evidence—and they are doing it on lines characteristic of the race. These are the only lines which have the slightest prospect of success in New South Watles.

Parliament, spurred on by the practical reformers, is fixing shorter and shorter hours for the sale of alcohol; and, by increased taxation on beer and spirits, is making drink harder and harder to buy. The Bishop of Liverpool’s ,Liquor Bill, which was only narrowly defeated in the Lords last year,; embodied the principle of the Time Limit; property in licenses was to ease after fifteen years and they were only to be granted annually. Also the people in any given area were to have the right to decide by vote on the extent and method of the sale of intoxicants in their areal It is an example of the “middle way” so dear to the British mind, as applied to the Prohibition question. In the meantime, alcohol is being attacked with deadly effect from other points. The drunkard is no ldnger regarded as a cross between a hero and a comedian. He no longer figures in sympathetic parts on the stage and he is out of date in vaudeville. The street drunk is made to feel that he is a nuisance; in private life young men who drink to excess are ostracised ; and no reputable club would put up with a “three-bottle man” for long. Only one kind of drunkard is tolerated at all—the elderly unfortunate who acquired the habit when teetotalism, now so fashionable amongst the athletic idols of the nations, was a shame and a reproach. Tt is along such lines that Australians will be led to greater and greater sobriety. Prohibition is a magnificent gesture in any community, but in a preponderantly British community it is a meaningless one.