CURRENT TOPICS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVII, Issue 292, 19 May 1915, Page 4

CURRENT TOPICS.

WHAT WE MAY CAT*. It would certainly be strange (as the Pan Francisco Argonaut points out) if the present convulsion should result in the permanent abolition by-general eonsent of the more evil forms of alcoholism throughout Europe, and it seems quite likely to do so. And perhaps if we had a juster view of actual values we sliouM see that even so colossal a war as this

is by no means an excessive price to pay for such a good. The casualty lists of alcohol are infinitely greater than those of the war, its wounds more fatal and its results more tragical. But it must come by general consent if it is to be beneficial, and not by the. mere weight of a majority. The temporary prohibitions already imposed were no more than a registration of the nearly universal opinion, as all restrictive laws ought to lie. If they should cease, to have a hijarly universal opinion to sustain them after the war they will fail, as all laws fail in the absence of such opinion. The tendency of the whole of civilisation is now contrary to the liquor traffic, in its cruder and more repulsive forms, and for this we have to thank, not the reformers nor the law-makers, but the forces of social evolution. Machinery and transportation agencies have, done more for the cause of abstinence than all the lectures and revivalists and legislators put together. Machines and railroads represent vast financial value, and still faster values in human lives, values too great to be trusted to unsteady hands or clouded brains. Sobriety has become first necessary and then, and therefore, reputable. And now it is quite on the cards that war will play the largest of all parts in the mitigation of a scourge far greater than war itself. Indeed, we may gain some comfort from the possibility, by no means a remote one, that our descendants a hundred years hence ivill see that the world actually gained more than it lost from the present holocaust in Europe, and that the medicine >vas not too drastic, for the slothful selfishness of an unbearable materialism into which the older civilisations have been steadily falling.

A DiiUKIUM 01' lIATK. There is a book selling .in Germany »} Me tens or thousands. It, j 8 called "(iott Strafe Kngland" ("Cor ,p. ullish I'-ngland ), and it consists of a collection of more or less obscene cartoons and gibes lrom^i,„,dk.i, simils/ . 0 f Munich. Uis described „s | M .j„„ "altogether hvn , h "1 wit, and resembling nothing so much as an "imbecile snarl." It records misUeds that England has not done, deteats that England has not suffered ami victories that Germany has not won. It depicts the British soldier as much more discreet that valorous, a „ ,ig htin ,, bv lepu y and getting the Allies to <lo ail the dirty work lor him, while Lord Kitchener am! the Army chiefs hide in the background. The reduction of (he food "llowance m Germany is described as being solely due to England's wholesale ■breaking of international laws," while its cartoons depicting the condition of German prisoners j„ Jingland show "the prisoners walking nm ,„l ;)osts to wl|it[h they are chained." with "roofless" r„i„ s as hen- sleeping p|„ce; a "dead uog on a d'sh lor their meals; rain on a shelterless racecourse for their bath- the sawing oil of a leg to illustrate the treatment ot. the lightly wounded; a bed covered only with cobwebs and infested with rats for the resting place of the badly wounded, and a cemetery as their winter shelter. To cap all,, the British method of protecting important, buildings from Zeppelin bombs is shown to ie by strewing the roofs with German prisoners. It is (says the Manawatn «taiHlnnl,lininwonileVtl.atJnKe" ol such perjuries and gross niisrepresont"tu.ro. ol the truth, the German people should be revelling in a delirium of hat,, the venom and full extent of which is be' mg expended upon the British who are consistently represented as being a cowardly, indolent race of degenerates—