PROHIBITION IS NOT TEMPERANCE

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 487, 17 October 1928, Page 16

PROHIBITION IS NOT TEMPERANCE

It is a very significant thing that the majority of the Bishops and Ministers of the Protestant Episcopal Church of America should have come out in favour of modifying the prohibition law. They have found by experience that it is the enemy and not the ally of true temperance, and they have sanctioned a national campaign for altering its repressive features. Increased drunkenness, an alarming development of the drug habit, pollcal corruption, and a hypocritical attitude toward the whole question are the outcome, they declare, of an impracticable law which time has proved to be inimical to the life of the nation. True temperance, they add, is an educational rather than a legislative problem. That conclusion is strongly supported by the report of the 'Royal Army Temperance Association. Although our standing forces at home and abroad number over 202,000 there were fewer than 260 magisterial convictions for drunkenness on the part of Army men. Yet there is no prohibition in the English Army, but some thing far more valuable—sobriety. And this sobriety has been attained by teaching the men self-respect, self control, self-knowledge and by providing them with healthy open-air distrac tions. That is true temperance because it is founded on character. A mo ml reform that is evolved from within stands some chance of permanency.—Advt.