CORRESPONDENCE.

Taranaki Daily News, 2 July 1921, Page 2

CORRESPONDENCE.

PROHIBITION IN AMERICA. (To the Editor.) Sir,—From time to time there goes through the Press of the Dominion telegraphic news, such as appeared in your paper under the above heading. These articles always report something that tells against prohibition, alarming some people as to what follows the closing down of the liquor trade. This latest article of this sOrt implies that prohibition in America is the result of “popular excitement and hysteria.” Let no one in this country, or anywhere else, entertain such an idea for a moment. The great reform is the outcome of many years of education In schools, and by pulpit and platform; and it has been a growing sentiment in all that great country for more than half a century, and it is still growing, notwithstanding what Mr. D. Van Burin may say. When we remember that thirty States have tried prohibition for various periods up to forty years, without any talk about anarchy in these States as a consequence of prohibition, we need not be alarmed at the opposition in New York. In large cities there is usually a lawless element, and that element voices the liquor lovers. If we want to know how the reform on the whole is working in America, let us not. the following report from a body of business men. The secretary of the Chamber of Commerce of Manchester, England, wrote to Mr. G. M. Massey, the hon, secretary of the British Chamber of Commerce in U.S.A., asking his views of the true effect of prohibition on commerce and Industry. This was done to meet the reports in England of the kind referred to above. Mr. Massey’s reply is too long to give here in full, but he writes of an improved temper ’in labor, an absence of "vicious” influences, and concludes that "Taking the situation as a whole and gauging it from trustworthy reports' by the greater industrial centres, from banks, railways, mines, and mercantile establishments, it Is beyond dispute that Prohibition has proved to be an economic factor.” Of course some do not like the law, and kick against it, hut as Mr. VV. Bryan, the great commoner of America, says: "The laws were not. made for those who like them, but for those who don’t like them, and the man who doesn’t obey the law, except when he likes it, is not a citizen; he is an anarchist.”—l am etc., G. H. M. June 30, 'W