FIRST-HAND KNOWLEDGE

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVI, Issue 4885, 2 October 1925, Page 3

FIRST-HAND KNOWLEDGE

[Published By Arrangement.}

THE TRUTH AND NOTHING ELSE.

By

WALTER J. ADAMS.

(Of the Honolulu Advertiser; Accredited Correspondent with the United States Fleet on its recent visit to New Zealand.) , New Zeafandersi cannot conceive the appalling situation that now exists in America, where the public is paying huge sums to enforce a prohibition that the same public is flouting on the sly. The dry element will say: “When another generation comes up, when the youth of to-day are matured, then there Will be no demand for liquor.” The dry element will not mention, however, the fact that more young people in U.S.A, are drinking to-day than ever before; that there is more drinking among women than ever before ; that wines and beers are being set aside in favour of whisky of doubtful origin and all the vile concoctions of a thousand illicit stills. There is not a city in America where a man cannot get liquor—even if he has never been there before—in whatever quantity he wishes. It’s not good liquor, and he pays through the nose for it, but i.t is liquor—all the more harmful because of Prohibition. Booze, ats Americans call it, is easily obtainable. It is delivered by the milkm,an, the clothes cleaner, or some other .agent. If one lives on a “route” a bootlegging agent will call ,to take one’s order —and will show 1 samples of his newest stocks. The bootlegger is bold about his work, and justly so. His patrons are the “best people,” the folk who can afford to pay high prices. In the meantime .the working man, the clerk or shop employee, drinks what he can get—or make at home. No more beers, no more wines for him ; but in their place "hell-brews” distilled by foreigners and peddled on the streets or in odd corners of the city.

High school boys carry flasks to school dances —they’re not considered gay unless they do —and shocking disclosurep have been made in the press concerning such ,affairs and their natural aftermath of scandal, sorrow, and deceit. Prohibition is responsible for all this evil. These things are unbelievable in New Zealand, but only too true in America. In America they are accepted as every-day facts, the fruit of illogical efforts to change human nature by legislation. New Zealanders should read American newspapers, summarise their daily display of news a.nent crime, viciousness, and evil, and then think whether they’d rather be legally purified or naturally Orderly. Laws do one or other of two .things —one law in America has done the other. That is the evidence of an actual “eye witness” of conditions under Prohibition. Why listen to the vague assertions of paid speechmakers when the facts presented by men on the spot prove Prohibition to be worse than an absolute failure ?* 1