PROHIBITION POLL IN NEW ZEALAND.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVII, Issue 2977, 19 December 1925, Page 4

PROHIBITION POLL IN NEW ZEALAND.

THE GAINS OP PROHIBITION,

(By HON. CRAWFORD

VAUGHAN.)

The Prohibition cause has emerged from the 1925 poll not completely triumphant, perhaps not wholly unscathed, but with distinct and crucial gains. Three issues were submitted to the electors: (1)

Continuance; (2) State purchase and control; (3) National Prohibition. Prohibition has, on the present incomplete returns, beaten Continuance by 22,462 votes, as against a lead of 18,122 in 1922. Prohibition leads State Purchase by 248,727 as against 264,000 three years ago.

If the first-past the post system applied to the liquor poll as it applies to the election of Parliamentary representatives, Prohibition would now be the law of the land. If the system of preferential voting had been permitted (on the Queensland proportion transferred from the second to the third issue), Prohibition would have been carried. The New Zealand Alliance rightly asks on what principle of justice is Continuance allowed to continue, seing that it recorded 75,000 votes less than the other two issues combined, ns compared with its minority of 53,9-19 in 1922. It cannot for a moment' legitimately be contended that having sjipped back 21,15 S votes in three years, Continuance has been endorsed by the electors. The middle issue which has secured an increased support, but, which still has only S per cent, of the total vote, has again robbed Prohibition of its vn lory. As a matter ■ 2 fact, Slat, Purchase has far fewer friends than the vote recorded in its favour would seem to imply . Tts chief henchmen were a number of clerical advocates of corporate control, who are relentlessly opposed to Stale Control, for which they voted. Their efforts are directed now towards retaining a third issue on the ballot paper, by substituting corporate for State Control.

The New Zealand Alliance has. however, won a substantial Parliamentarv victory and holds the written pledges of an absolute majority of members committed to removing the middle issue from (he ballot paper. This marks the greater advance towards Prohibition for the past ten years at least. With ■Slate or corporate control out ol the way, a victory for Prohibition seems assured, provided, of coarse, the campaign of education is pursued with unabated vigor. Prohibition has recorded more votes than it secured three years ago, while up to the present Continuance has polled less votes. Ihe temperance cause is necessarily handicapped bv the inllnx of. some 30,000 immigrants between the polls. Most of these have to be weaned from a predisposition in favour of liquor. It speaks ucll for Prohibition that, in spile of the big vote of the “Homeies,” the movement held its own. Ihe cause, too, lost something through the addition to the polling lists of young voters, who, during the war, could not he reached by temperance workers. Indeed, the war had a reactionary effect on the prohibition cause in rciaPon to the young p-oplc, and it was largely upon i< is that the liquor party ' ere bank; tg.

The work n aching young people by old and new methods of instilling Prohibition ideals has keen well in hand for some time, and the fields should hr- while with this harvest in the years io come. Altogether to those who taico a long view of the position, the furore is more than hopeful. The long night of liquor control is passing. Even now the dawn of a better day is breaking. Time is on our side, America is clearing up her difficulties: Canada has given a slashing vote for Prohibition (New' Brunswick returning 40 (Ivys to 8 wots) ; Scotland has rallied to the call; Glasgow, the second city of the Empire has eliminated liquor from its civic functions, and the pressure of inexorable economic necessity is fast drawing England, as the on immediate means of self-preservation, to follow the lead of other great English-speaking cousins across the Atlantic. It is with these facts to cheer them on that New Zealanders are girding up their loins for the new campaign.