LIQUOR LAW REFORM.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 4178, 11 August 1874, Page 3

LIQUOR LAW REFORM.

EDITED BT THE HON. WILLIAM FOX, M.H.R. [The Editor ot this journal is not responsible for the opinions herein expressed. The column is solely under the charge of its special Editor.] AMERICAN JOURNALISTS ON THE WHISKY WAR. MARK TWAIN ON THE AMERICAN TEMPERANCE INSURRECTION. f In a letter to the London Standard, this well known writer concludes an article on the whisky war as follows : “ I will not afflict you with statistics, but I desire to say just a word or two about the character of this crusade. The crusaders are young girls and women—not the inferior sort, but the very best in the village communities. The telegraph keeps the newspapers supplied with the progress of the war, and thus the praying infection spreads from town to town, day after day, week after week. When it attacks a community it seems to seize upon almost everybody in it at once. There is a meeting in a church, speeches are made, resolutions are passed, a purse for expenses is made up, a ‘praying bamd’ is appointed; if it be a large town, half-a-dozen praying bands, each numbering as many as a-hundred women, are appointed, and the working district of each band marked out. Then comes a grand assault in force all along the line. Every stronghold of rum is invested; first one and then another champion ranges up before the proprietor, and offers up a special petition for him ; ,he has to stand meekly there behind his bar, under the eyes of a great concourse of ladies who are better than ho is and are aware of it, and hear all the secret iniquities of his business divulged to the angels above, accompanied by the sharp sting of -wishes for his regeneration, which imply an amount of need for it which is in the last degree uncomfortable to him. If he holds out bravely, the crusaders hold out more bravely still —or at least more persistently; though I doubt if the grandeur , of the performance would not be considerably heightened if one solitary crusader were to try praying at a hundred rum-sellers in a body for a while, and see how it felt, to have everybody against her, instead of for her. If the man holds out, the crusaders camp be-

fore his place, and keep up the siege till they wear him out. In one case, they besieged a rum-shop two whole weeks. They built a shed before it, and kept up the praying all night and all day long, every day of the fortnight ; and this in the bitterest winter weather too. They conquered. You may ask if such an investment and such interference with a man’s business (in cases where he is 1 protected’ by a license) is lawful ? By no means. But the whole community being with the crusaders, the authorities have usually been overawed and afraid to execute the laws, the authorities being in too many cases mere little politicians, and more given to look to chances of re-election than fearlessly discharging their duty according to the terms of their official oaths. Would you consider the conduct of these crusaders justifiable ? Ido —thoroughly justifiable. They find themselves voiceless in the making of laws and the election of officers to execute them. Born with brains, bom in the country, educated, having large interests at stake, they find their tongues tied and their hands fettered, while every ignorant whisky-drinking foreign-bom savage in the land may hold office, help to make the laws, degrade the dignity of the former and break the latter at his oiyn sweet will. They see their fathers, husbands, and brothers sit inanely at home and allow the scum of the country to assemble at the ‘ primarie,’ name the candidates for office from their own vile ranks, and, unrebuked, elect them. They live in the midst of a country where there is no end to the laws and no beginning to the execution of them. And when the laws intended to protect their sons from destruction by intemperance lie torpid and without sign of life year after year, they recognise that here is a matter which interests them personally—a matter which comes straight home to them. And since they are allowed to lift no legal voice against the outrageous state of things they suffer under in this regard, I think it is no wonder that their patience has broken down at last, and they have contrived to persuade themselves that they are justifiable in breaking the law of trespass when the laws that should make the trespass needless are allowed by the voters to lie dead and inoperative. I cannot help glorying in the pluck of these women, sad as it is to see them displaying themselves in these unwomanly ways ; sad as it is to see them carrying their grace and their purity into places which should never know their presence; and sadder still as it is to see them trying to save a set of men who, it seems to me, there can be no reasonable object in saving. It does not become us to scoff at the crusaders, remembering what it is they have borne all these years, but it does become us to admire their heroism—a heroism that boldly faces jeers, curses, ribald language, obloquy of every kind and degree—in a word, every manner of thing that pure-hearted, pureminded women such as these are naturally dread and shrink from, and remains steadfast through it all, undismayed, patient, hopeful, giving no quarter, asking none, determined to conquer, and succeeding. It is the same old superb spirit that animates that other devoted, magnificent, mistaken crusade of six hundred years ago. The sons of such women as these must surely be worth saving from the destroying power of rum. The present crusade will doubtless do but little work against intemperance that will be really permanent, but it will do what is as much, or even more, to the purpose, I think. I think it will suggest to more than one man that if women could vote they would vote on the side of morality, even if they did vote and speak rather frantically and furiously ; and it will also suggest that when the women once made up their minds that it was not good to leave the all-powerful ‘ primaries’ in the hands of loafers, thieves, and pernicious little politicians, they would not sit indolently at home, as their husbands and brothers do now, but would hoist their praying banners, take the field in force, pray the assembled political scum back to the holes and slums where they belong, and, set up some candidates fit for decent human beings to vote for.”