The Telephone. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. GISBORNE, WEDNESDAY, JUNE 18.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume I, Issue 160, 18 June 1884, Page 2

The Telephone. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. GISBORNE, WEDNESDAY, JUNE 18.

Sergeant Bullen certainly holds very peculiar notions in the matter of his recommendations to the of the Licensing Committee. He objects to a piano being played in the bar parlor of an hotel because, as he says, music is calculated to lead men to drink. We had always been under an impression that music tended in quite an opposite direction. But if music induces men to drink, so does good, unadulterated liquor; therefore to prevent men from drinking, Sergeant Bullen should insist upon hotel keepers retailing bad beer and worse spirits. A well warmed, well lighted room is calculated to entice men to drink, therefore Sergeant Bullen should prohibit a cheerful fire in bar parlors, with lights turned up. Bright-wa'l-papers, attractive pictures, newspapers, and periodicals take men into hotels, where and when of course they are bound to call for liquors. Sergeant Bullen should certainly put down pictures and newspapers. He should insist, as a preventive to drinking, that hotels should be made as uncomfortable as possible. Then Sergeant Bullen would have the satisfaction of seeing hotels shut up and comfortable, pleasant sly-grog-selling go on in unlicensed houses. Sergeant Bullen is a very worthy officer, but with a very narrowed intellect in matters where a correct judgment is called for. It is satisfactory to know that the liberty of ruining hotel-keepers is in the next Parliament to be taken away from Committees and placed in the hands of properly appointed stipendiary officials of judgment and experience, while at the same time the principles of local option are not to be interfered with. The absurdity of our Licensing Committee seconding the narrow views of Sergeant Bullen on the question whether a piano shall or shall not be placed “ up-stairs, downstairs, or in my lady’s chamber” would be laughable if it were not so serious an infringement on the liberty of the landlord and the innocent amusement of the people. We may state that it is only by straining and violating the meaning and intention of the Act that the Committee, or any Sergeant of Police has power to prevent the sound of a piano in the bar-parlor of a hotel.