MR HARNETT V. NO LICENSE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXX, Issue 419, 4 August 1908, Page 4

MR HARNETT V. NO LICENSE.

Invercargill, July 28

The assertions of Mr Harnett, manager of the British football teim, were considered at a meeting of the Invercargill Ministers’ Association, then the following resolution was carried ;—“ That this Association ot the Invercargill Ministers places on record its protest against the gross misrepresentation and wild statements alleged to have been made by a Mr Harnett in an interview at Auckland last Saturday in which he deprecates the inferior accomodation of hotels, extensive drinking in private houses, the appalling drunkenness in the streets, the fraud and deceit of the inhabitants, and the complete failure, of ‘ No-license ’ reform, these charges being completely answered in a manifesto published over the signature of the Mayor and one hundred leading citizens ot Invercargill, many of whom are not identical with the No-license movement, but who have given emphatic testimony to the splendid results accruing from the introduction of the reform. This Association expresses regret that Mr Harnett should have adopted such a courageous (?) method of besmirching the name of our town, and attacking the private habits and character of our citizens on the eve of his departure from the Dominion, thereby precluding an outraged community from asking that he substantiate his charges, and, failing to prove them, demanding in the interests of justice, truth, and honour their withdrawal.”

The Wanganui Chronicle dealing with Mr Harnett’s statements says:—Mr George Harnett’s farewell to New Zealand takes the shape of a “fling” at “Nolicense.” Mr Harnett is the manager of the British football team, and during his “off” time he has been loudly bewailing the fact that in one of the towns he visited he was debarred the privilege of buying just what he wanted to drink. He has been smarting under the injustice ever since. When he brought his team to Wanganui he called in to tell us about it, and for' a full ten minutes he talked with all the force of a tornado. His language was scarcely suited to a drawing room. Some people, not over squeamish, might have rather called it dirty. But that is by the way. It was painfully evident that the drought he suffered in Invercargill hadn’t agreed with him, and that for a couple of days at the most his appetite must have been treated with brutal disregard. He invited us to believe that while he had been forced to remain as dry as a dust heap, other folks were literally tumbling over one another in a disgusting medley of cosmopolitan drunkenness. People were drunk in the streets and drunk in the houses. It was a case of whisky everywhere and not a drop to drink ! In short it was simply awful —from Mr George Harnett’s point of view. His windy tirade was so obviously exaggerated and so manifestly ridiculous that we declined to lake his denunciation of Invercargill any more seriously than we did his blatant assertion that Dunedin was absolutely the most immoral city he had ever struck, that his men had been persistently pestered by young girls, and that, taking one thing with the other, while this sort of thing might be good enough for New Zealanders it didn’t at all suit an Englishman of his calibre. Now, on the eve of his departure from the Dominion, Mr Harnett has unburdened himself to an Auckland interviewer, and, on the strength of his own alleged experiences in the course of a flying visit to Invercargill, he presumes to advise the electors of the country as to the course they should advise in regard to No-license, If the electors could but see and hear Mr Harnett as we saw and heard him they would be able to form a pretty good idea of the value of his advice, but the cutest of them would find it difficult to properly appreciate the magnitude of hjs egotism. It is immense. For instance, in the course of his entertaiuing deliverance he assured us that he was burning to “ get back Home,” as he wanted to “ have a go ”at the Asquith crowd. England, he declared, would never stand the licensing Bill. If the worst came to the worst he’d go into politics himself, and the man he intended to have a shot at first of all was Will Crooks. Poor Crooks, we are afraid his political days are numbered. But as for we New Zealanders —well, we can afford to laugh even at Mr George Harnett.