LICENSING AND TEMPERANCE IN SCANDINAVIA.

Te Aroha News, Volume XXVI, Issue 43093, 16 May 1907, Page 1

LICENSING AND TEMPERANCE IN SCANDINAVIA.

THE LATEST PANACEA. By Robert E. Batty.

(Continued from last issue.)

The unsupported opinions which are unfavourable to Prohibition, and the criticism of teetotalism which the book contains, will do no harm, for the reader may search the volume from cover to cover without finding a point buttressed by fact which is scored against Jthe propaganda of the United Kingdom Alliance. When, however, one leaves the theories of the author and deals with the actual evidence which he has collected, the accumulated force of the figures he cites, the authorities he quotes, and the personal experiences he records, it seems impossible to understand how anyone'can be left with a shred of belief in Scandinavian company management a r a model or guide for Britism reformers, Che author’s historical review Establishes that there is no possible analogy between the conditions which led to the establishment of the Bolags and Samlags of Sweden and Norway, where the entiie populace had given itself up to the drinking of native spirits, and the existing conditions in England, where the national beverage is beer. Mr Pratt contends that the great evils from excessive indulgence in ardent spirits which the Gothenburg system was designed to check were “ national, ” evils owing their origin not to any highly ' organised “ trade ” actuated by a desire to enrich itself at the cost of the people, Out to the desire on the one: hand of representatives of the -Hate to secure and to the unwisdom, on the other hand, of so much of the past legislation. He concludes “These considerations are all the more deserving of being borne in mind, inasmuch as the tendency on the part of advocates of the Gothenburg or of the * Disinterested Management ’ system to-day is to rail against private trade in liquor, and to argue that all is well if only the said trade is left in the hands of those rulers of the State u whose wisdom and absolute isinterestedness, they maintain unfidence can alone be placed.”

Mr Pratt establishes with a wealth of detail that the success claimed for the Gothenburg system, as already applied in Sweden and Norway,,.is mainly based on inferences drawn from incomplete statistics, especially in regard to alleged decline in consumption,' such -statistics relating only sales by the particular company, and leaving out of account the very large and obviously increasing sales by retail merchants or in other directions. While the attention of writers on the Gothenburg system as adopted in that city has been concentrated almost without exception on the drinking-bars and their 'imitations and restrictions, practically nothing has been said by them concerning the retail shops also cenducted by the Bolag. Yet the annu; 1 r port of the company shov s that while their bar sales <*f spirits amounted to 648,766 litres in 1905, jjtlu-ir retail sales were 1,198,697 litres, or 249,930 litres more.

Mr Pratt givesa vivid description of the enormous trade done in these retail shop* of I hell ,>lug. He found some 4,000 bottles, brought in by perhaps 3,600 customers, filled for them in a small shop between f lie hours of 9 a.m. and si \ p m.