LIQUOR LAW REFORM.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 4183, 17 August 1874, Page 3

LIQUOR LAW REFORM.

EDITED BY THE HOW. WILLIAM POX, M.H.E. [The Editor of this journal is not responsible for the opinions herein expressed. The column is solely under the charge of its special Editor.] BARMAIDS. During the passing of the Amended Licensing Bill in the Assembly, Mr. Box endeavored to interest the Legislature in the cause of this class of females; and, we are glad to say, that his effort was not without success, although he failed to carry the provisions he proposed in their entirety. As the debates in Committee are not reported, we have no record of Mr. Fox’s speech on the subject in Hansard; but the following is an outline of what he said • He said that this employment of young women in the business of public drinking bars was not consistent with the boasted civilization of the period. There was no doubt it was an employment which subjected those engaged in it to most dangerous and seductive influences, and tended to degrade and deteriorate their purity. He would put his case in a very few words. He would suppose the case of any member of that House, whose circumstances might be such as require him to bring up his boy to some trade, until a view to his future maintenance. We will suppose him to have carefully tended his boy’s early nurture and education, and to have watched over him with a fatherly care. Is there any man here who, under such circumstances, would take his son by the hand and lead him to the nearest publican, and ask him to take him as an apprentice, and employ him in the trade of his bar ? He was certain there was no fathei of wellregulated affections, who would not shrink with abhorrence from such a career for his boy. But how with a mother and her daughter ? Was there a mother in the world who had carefully watched over her daughter’s early years, protecting her from all evil ways, and training her in good; who had taught her to pray by her mother’s knee, and made her the pride of the domestic hearth; who, when she reached seventeen or eighteen years of age, would take and immolate her on the altar of Bacchus, by placing her in the bar of a public house ? There lived not the woman, unless she were herself lost and degraded by long familiarity with strong drink, who would not shrink with horror from submitting her daughter to such a fate. Well, then, if all right-thinking fathers and mothers would recoil from making their daughters barmaids, . ought the Government to allow the opportunity to exist for those young girls who had not wise fathers nor virtuous mothers, to drift into the dangerous and degrading position of a barmaid. Look at our inconsistency. At this moment we are seeking to import young women, immigrants, who are to be the mothers of the future people of New Zealand. We rightly endeavor to have them selected from the purest and most uncorrupted sources. What an outcry there would be if the Agent-General were to send out a shipload, and inform us that he had collected them from the bars of the ginshops of Wappiug or Kotherhitho ? And yet here are we, scrupulous to prudery about the purity of the future mothers of New Zealand in the matter of their selection in England, yet x-eady to consign them to a barmaid’s career the moment they arrive, and willing to afford every facility for those already here to devote themselves to the same sort of business. Mr. Vogel had intimated that he (Mr. Fox) had a dislike to barmaids, and his attempt to create a diversion in this way had been echoed by some of the silly advocates of the publican in the newspapers. He entirely denied the allegation. - His desire was to benefit the class. He had no object but their welfare in view. The best tiling that could be done for them would be to prevent them being barmaids at all, but, failing that, he was prepared to stand to his proposal that they should be put on the same footing as other women employed in trades which require prolonged physical exertion, and afforded the same protection as afforded to others by the Factories’ Employment Act. To this extent, at all events, ho was confident the House would support him. We are sorry to say the House did not support Mr. Fox’s proposals, at least, not to the extent suggested by him, of either abolishing the employment of females in bars altogether, or, at.least, bringing them within the protection of Mr. Bradshaw’s humane Females Employment Act. Mr. Steward, however, proposed a modification of Mr. Fox’s proposal, to the following effect : “ No female other than the licensee, or the wife or daughter of the licensee, as the case may be, shall be employed in the bar of any licensed house for more than ten hours in each day of twenty-four hours ; and no female except as aforesaid shall be employed in the bar of any licensed house before the hour of eleven in the forenoon, or after the hour of eleven post meridian.” This, we are glad to say, was carried on a division by a majority of 24 to 12, and a clause inflicting a penalty on any publican permitting an infringement of the law was annexed, on the motion of Mr. Sheehan, very much against the wishes of Mr, Vogel, who seemed much

disturbed at this limitation of the power of his protegd the publican to make white slaves.of his barmaids. i Another of Mr. Fox’s proposed amendments, we are glad to say, was entirely successful; we allude to the abolition of those dens of infamy, the dance saloons, with hired dance girls, which have so long disgraced the West Coast Goldfields. The institution is one which would be disgraceful to a community of Mahometans or Heathen Chinee, and we are glad to note that only one member in the House dared to say a word in their favor. The alacrity with which the Government accepted Mr. Fox’s clause on the subject was very suggestive. The new clause proposed by Mr. Fox, for obliging all bars and public drinking rooms to have open windows, without blinds or other obstructions, so that it might be seen from the outside what is going on within, was lost on division, but created much amusement from Mr. Fox informing the House that its parent was Mr. Vogel. He read a passage from a speech which Mr. Vogel delivered in 1872, stronglv recomtn ending the proposal, and he told the House how he (Mr. Fox) had been called a fool and a lunatic by a certain literary publican at Christchurch, and. by the press organs of the liquor traffic, for proposing such a clause. Mr. Vogel’s expression of face was highly amusing when Mr. Fox gave the House the evidence of his being the author of the clause, but be showed great good humor and tact by walking round the Speaker’s chair with Mr. Fox and the other “Ayes.” In spite of this, however, the clause was lost, and with it an excellent suggestion for bringing the liquor traffic a little more under the light of day than it is at present.