MR PHILIP SNOWDEN.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXV, Issue 286, 1 December 1914, Page 2

MR PHILIP SNOWDEN.

SOCIAL REFORMER AND PROHIBITIONIST. BEATEN WITH HIS OWN STICK. (By “New Zealander.”) “Oh, that mine adversary had written a book.”—Job, 31, 35. Mr Snowden, on page 11 of his book “Socialism and Syndicalism,” offers this charming criticism of Dr Sheldon, the Rev. R. B. S. Hammond, the Rev. Mr Dawson, and the other resident or peripatetic sophists who have peregrinated this country from time to time attributing all manner of evils to the liquor industry. Mr Philip Snowden has been engaged to perpetuate this make-believe, but he cannot do it. He makes reservations, and has written: — Once the whole question of Poverty was explained by Temperance advocates by one word “Drink”; but these advocates now realise that the problem of poverty is not capable of such a simple explanation, nor can it be solved by the simple expedient of i Universal abstinence from liquor. There you are, ladies and gentlemen, Mr Philip Snowden says your poverty, and all the evils that flow therefrom, are not to be remedied by prohibition —“the universal abstinence from liquor.” Mr Philip Snowden, the Social reformer, knows that Mr Philip 'owden, the prohibitionist, is wrong .when he advocates “universal abstinence from liquor” as a remedy for social evils, but the second Mr Philip Snowden must earn his prohibition money! The Incorruptible! The prohibitionists, like Dr Sheldon and the Rev. Hammond tell us that the liquor industry is the industry that produces all manner of nameless iniquities. Mr Philip Snowden tells them they are wrong. Here is what Mr Snowden says (page 17-18, ibid) : Vice, immorality, drunkenness, insanity, and unutterable misery and suffering are the direct results of the unequal distribution

of wealth. Of course, in twenty-one years prohibitionists have spent two millions sterling, by modest estimate, on the self-glorification business, and they have not reformed one inebriate. They might have thrown these £2,000,000 in the dust-bin for all the good they have done—save to a favored few. Think, that vast sum wasted upon prohibition might have paid £SOOO to each of 400 deserving citizens! Again, prohibitionists tell us that drink is the cause of physical deterioration, and the reason for so many recruits at the Boer war time being rejected. Mr Snowden knows better. On page 25 of his book you’ll find these words:— The evidence given before the Committee on Physical Deterioration (England), in 1904, revealed an appalling state of physical condition among the working classes, due to insufficiency of nourishing food, bad housing, and ignorance —all the direct outcome of poverty. Not a word about drink as the cause of physical deterioration. Every unbiased observer knows that the “weeds” of humanity are not found among the moderate users of alcoholic beverages. The best men and women everywhere are not total abstainers. Sorry, hut this is another prohibitionist bladder busted! But Mr Philip Snowden pricks some more of the prohibitionist bladders. Prohibitionists are continuously attributing crime, suicide, and insanity to drink. Mr Snowden says they are altogether wrong in this particular:— The poverty of the working

classes lead them into crime, drive them to drink, to suicide and send them to insane asylums.—Vide p. 28. “Privation” and “mental stress” are the causes of the increase of insanity. Dr. Sheldon told us that more than half the area and more than halt the people of the United States were under prohibition, and that crime and poverty and all the other evils of humanity were being diminished, if not wiped out, by the prohibition wave. Mr Philip Snowden’s book, in effect, says Dr. Sheldon’s talk is all moonshine. Fifteen to twenty millions of the people in America (U.S.A.) are always underfed and poorly housed; four millions of these are public paupers; 1,700,000 children who y should be at school are wage- , earners; 10,000,000 of the living j will die of tuberculosis. (Page 33). More than half the people are under prohibition and such social conditions abound; and these indications of an unhealthy industrial and social system —insanity, suicides, illiteracy, etc.— are to be found, observes Mr Snowden, “in the United States in a more aggravated form than they have been shown to exist in the United Kingdom”—pages 34-35. Yet Great Bidtain and Ireland know nothing of prohibition and its degrading, destroying influences.

Prohibition-ridden States in America are blighted, too, with immorality of the worst type. It is not the liquor business that is blamed. Mr Snowden says immorality is due to “capitalism, poverty and unemployment.” The gross revenue received from this immoral trade was four millions sterling a year. One sentence from this Report must be given. It reads: “It is a sad and humiliating admission to have to make," etc. (page 195). But why add \more concerning the immorality of the chief city of a State in which the prohibitionists have found so much soul-comfort from putting the larger part of it under nolicense? Prohibition was the god of the Pharisees. Prohibition is as a moral agency a ridiculous farce. As an abater of liquor consumption it has proved itself in New Zealand a rank imposture; and as for reducing drunkenness, it has helped to aggravate that very sin by its policy and its tactics. When people are spending more on liquor, and when drunkenness increases one hundredfold since no-license captured one area, how can it be said by honest or sensible men that no-license and prohibition are temperance reforms? The best part of Mr Philip Snowden condemns them, notwithstanding all his efforts to justify the expense of his out-bring-ing by the pjrohibition people. Then finally Mr Snowden informs us that if all the people become teetotal the extra taxation required to make up the revenue would be drawn from the working classes, vide his House of Commons speech, June 2nd, 1913.

If you would avoid more crime, more insanity, more immorality and more general degradation, which come with no-license and prohibition, and more taxation, you will assert your manhood, establish your liberty, and protect your properties. x