INTEMPERANCE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXIX, Issue 3763, 13 April 1907, Page 2

INTEMPERANCE.

(Contributed.) The world has puzzled its brains for centuries over the great question of intemperance, and still she can give no workable theory how to put a stop to it. What is to be done to relieve the misery, degredation, shame, and lust from our great cities and villages? How shall we fight this growing pest, which is the commonest vice of today ?” One thing is absolutely certain, and that is, it will never be abolished by Act of Parliament—which the Prohibitionists are aiming for. Prohibition means annihilation, and no country will accept that, simply because it takes away a man’s rights and freedom. If Prohibition were carried, the questions would immediately be asked : “ Are we any better off ? Is not the last state worse than the first? When we look at Nature we see in her certain laws, and these laws unfailingly bring about certain results. While there is seed time and harvest, things both good and evil grow up together; in the same field poisonous plants and harmless plants grow together. The beasts of the field may eat the one, but not the other. Instinct tells them which to pass ; if they break the law and follow not instinct, the result is death. Man himself is placed in a world where virtues and vices grow together. Man develops when he follows virtue under the moral laW, and becomes in every way superior to everything else in creation. When he deliberately breaks the moral law and follows vice the result is obvious —his spiritual and higher growth is warped and he falls into a state of immorality, and becomes the basest and meanest thing in God’s world. Now the moral law forbids excess, and so it follows that if intoxicating liquors act upon a person in such a way as to make him morally unfit for society, that man is doing wrong in partaking of those things which are poisonous to his nature, and mar his usefulness in the world. Society condones with the drunkard, and Society becomes responsible for his fall, because she knows very well that of all the vices in the world the sin of intemperance is the one which opens wide the flood gates to all the most impious and basest of crimes. Let society shun the drunkard. Let her in every walk of life, among the rich aS well as the poor, show her strong disapproval, and in one year the ranks of inebriates would be reduced to half ■their number. Let a drunkard be looked upon with the same loathing as one would look upon a leper, or some foul putrifying disease, and it would do more good in a week than all the terrible denunciations of well meaning temperance communities. Appeal to a man’s manliness and his conscious knowledge of degradation and sin, and he would look upon his life in a very different light. As long as Society accepts drunkenness as a neeessary evil it will spread with amazing rapidity. Man has a natural bias to evil, and it logically follows that if an evil is winked over, he thinks it is no wrong in indulging in it. Let society put her finger on a man’s pride and appeal to his higher and better self, and his innate goodness would be ashamed of the sin he was committing. But society laughs at what they call the “drunks,” and gloats with sensual eyes at his vulgar insanity. She would do better to shun him and show him that he was morally unfit to mix with his fellow creatures, and that being corrupted, he was marring the beauty and harmony of the natural world around him. It is society who can exercise the moral law, and it is the moral law, and the moral law only, that can ever teach man the degradation and lowness of a. drunkard’s life. Appeal to a man’s standard of morality. Let him feel his utter uselessness in the order of nature. Let him see what a mean, base, contemptible atom he is on the face of a beautiful world. Let him behold the ruin and misery of a misspent life, and in nine cases out of every ten it would bring about the necessary reform. To-day, Society is the great factor of the world —she can crush down, never to rise again, anything she objects to—or she can raise up on a pedestal of fame that which she admires. Only let Society take up the question 'of “ Intemperance ” in the right way, and show an enthusiasm for good, and good will be the result.