CORRESPONDENCE.

Manawatu Herald, 9 December 1893, Page 3

CORRESPONDENCE.

We are not responsible for the statements or opinions of correspondents. TO THE EMTOB OF THE MANA.WATD HERALD. Sir, — Various reasons move men and women when writing letters to the papers to assume a norn de plume. One reason no doubt is to bide the name of the writer and this is the spirit of gambling or chance. It Rets the reader at once to guess who is the writer ? Who, for example, is townsman ? And you hear " I'll bet you it is so and so !" It is very wicked to encourage and set on fire this taste of gambling in a publio paper. Bat, Sir, though this is the kind of logic with which " Townsman " starts his letter, yet, seriously, he begs the whole question at the start. He mixed up gambling, hazard, raffling, chance, sin and ruin in one grand poisonous mixture. We have the Parliament of New Zealand and the Bishop of Manchester brought in to support his argument that to tat;e this poiionou* draught would b? fatal. Good causes are often injured by these abnormal freaks of human nature aud those who are subject to them do no good but rather harm where they mean well, we call them bigots or persons subject to blind z»al It is so for example with some very extreme advocates of the Temperance Cause who declare that those who do not join them are outside the pale of salvation, aud are made to feel harder words than tho . drunkards themselves. It in the amount and quality of drink which makes tho drunkard. It is the kind and quality of the spirit of speculation which wakes the gambler. And also it is the kind and quality of home training that makes or unmakes a child not the temptations to which he is exposed. Those who ' speculate ' in the baa sense of the word in the same way in which we use the word 1 drink ' in a bad sense do not learn it at a Church Bazaar any more than those learn to be drunkards, who are brought up strtokly at. home as temperate drinkers of beer, wine or spirits. To be temperate in all things is to be able to use and not abuse. Sir, the spirit of bigotry in the dark eyes of thf Church which walled men up alive beneath the House of Prayer because of heterodoxy is not one to be cultivated in this day. I fear with such men as our friend " Townsman " aa Pope, in these days, men would have lived iv even greater terror of their lives.— l am, <fee, George Aitkens. The Parsonage, Foxton, December Bth, 1893.