STARTLING INDICTMENT.

Taranaki Daily News, 16 December 1919, Page 5

STARTLING INDICTMENT.

'' BISHOP CLEARY SPEAKS OUT. < (From a Special Correspondent.) (Published by Arrangement.)' Wellington, December 16. The recent issue of Auckland'* Catholic magazine "The Month," liaM just arrived in Wellington, and one on the most surprising features is a power*' ful editorial by his Lordship Dr. deary* Catholic Bishop of Auckland, dealing with the forthcoming poll on prohibit j tion.

"HUMAN WRECKAGE." Dr. Clcary writes thus rejjftrding th«\ liquor trade:— • "Herein lies one of the tragedies Ot> the traffic in intoxicating drink} the antagonism between-the monetary interests of a large section of 'the trade' and the welfare pf the individual and the nation. Out in no man's land, closft in front of the trendies, where we served as a military chaplain, there laid the piled up or scattered bodies—: all unburied—of over three than« sand gallant colonial atortn trodps.\ that had been destroyed by a su4« den whirlwind of fire from tie nearby German lines. That mot-' ing spectacle of battered bodiesdoes not represent a tithe of t&o human wreckage left all over this' Dominion by the sins of a considerable section o( 'the trade.*' whom neither moral suasion, nor the civil law, nor the appeal of pity has been able to bring with* in control, and the less appeal there is to conscience in '(be trade' the more must the State rely {Or reform upon its power and right of repressing a traffic the evils of which it has hopelessly failed to reduce to the limits of tolerance or moderation. "Ae to the right of a State to suppress the liquor traffio," said the great Catholio Archbishop Spalding, "there can be no question, since the right to suppress crime involves the right to suppress its cause." "It is the sins and the sin-making and crime attendant upon the operations of 'tha trade' that have I created the movement for its abolition; they have furnished it with its chief driving force; they have made it (in our personal view) a wholesome necessity is a l&nd that would give its best to the shaping of the new and better era that is, we hope, at hand."