COUNTING THE COST.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVI, Issue 4898, 2 November 1925, Page 1

COUNTING THE COST.

(Published by Arrangement.)

A LAWLESS BUSINESS; CORRUPTION RAMPANT. (By Henry Bourne Joy, Director Packard Car Co., and formerly Director Federal Reserve Bank at Chicago.) “The almost countless 1 millions of dollars which have been appropriated and spent in five years to accomplish the enforcement of bone dry . Prohibition have failed in that accomplishment. Not only has this country failed, as naturally must be the case, to make itself bone dry at ,the vast cost of the' appropriations for the dry armies and dry navies, but also; it has been foregoing during that period a revenue which it might readily have in its national '.treasury of approximately five hundred millions of dollars per annum, excise tax, andean amount of money approximating that sum has been going to the purveyors of alcoholic beverages, ’whom some people call bootleggers and others call merchant princes. “Our courts are consigning to' gaol, to associate with thugs, murderers, burglars, and every sort of villain, a large number of decent - young men who have taken a chance of making easy money by purveying liquor across the border's. Men have always taken SjUch risks for easy money. They are not cheating our customs nor defrauding .the Government of revenue, because there is no duty, on the goods imported. They take the risk for the. easy money. Again human nature prevails. "It is perfectly safe to state to-day that this country cannot survive with half of its z people trying ,to put the other half of its population in the penitentiaries of our country for following the natural dictates of human instincts;. ’—“The North American Review,” 1925. A law which makes criminals of people, Who are not criminals, and which would transform this country into a kind o|f penal settlement is not a fit law" for New Zealand.* 13