A PROTEST.

Patea Mail, 23 June 1881, Page 2

A PROTEST .

Colonel Trimble, is great as a Home authority. He tells the House what he has seen and what he has done. If the* House refuses to be guided by the concentrated experience of this Home authority, Woe and wail must overtake that House! Colonel Trimble’s experiences of the drink traffic in Liverpool have been retailed to the House in Wellington, with this result, - that free trade in liquor is the proper thing to keep people sober, to reduce crime, to teach children the. true way of life, and to promote health, wealth, and wisdom. If these are not the outcome of free trade in liquor, why does Colonel Trimble rcccommend the example of Liverpool ? It is enough to know he advocates free trade in the . retailing of intoxicating drinks, and that he cites Liverpool in evidence. Any politician familiar with Liverpool, familiar as a resident who knows nearly as much as Colonel Trimble, will stand aghast at his “ experiences.” Liverpool is a nest of liquor shops. The • poorer streets have a roaring “ public ” at every corner and one at every few yards besides. No town under the sun does so much drjnking as Liverpool in proportion to population. The demoralising results are disgustingly visible. Some results are seen at the daily sittings of the Police Court, and often at the Coroner’s Comrt. The number of loose women of the lowest type is enormous, and their evenings are hpent mostly in or near those flaring centres of evening de banchery, the free trade publics which Colonel Trimble recommends. No part of London is half, so bad as the dock region of Liverpool, though other parts of the town are not much different. No social fact is more striking than to pass from Liverpool to Manchester or London, for the difference in all that springs from drinking is too palpable to be misunderstood by a candid critic, Liverpool tried free trade in retailing excisable liquors; but after the mischief was done by the whole place blossoming into new drinking shops, a majority of the Licensing Bench revoked that system, and returned to the old restriction. It is not easy to And a Liverpool politician who will state in public now-a-days that the free-trade spasm which the town went through has proved beneficial to anybody but a few men who made fortunes by opening publics whereever a house could be got for the' purpose. The same plan was tried in. selling beer without a spirit license. Certain Liberal politicians altered the English law to enable any house above a certain rateable value to have a license for selling beer for consumption on. premises. Whoever lived in a manufacturing town at that time, about thirty years ago, must have .been impressed with the phenomenon of two or three cottages in every little street putting up a beer-shop sign, and

becoming noisy nuisances. Working men getting small wages could hardly avoid living within sight and sound o a beer-shop. What were the social results to the individual drinker ?—to the wife who either drank or cried or starved ?—to the little children who learnt to know the adjoining beershop as the place where father got drunk every Saturday night ? Ask Colonel Trimble. He believes in free trade, and that was free trade.