PROHIBITION A FAILURE.

Taranaki Daily News, 26 November 1921, Page 4

PROHIBITION A FAILURE.

(Published by Arrangement.) The following aub-leadei' appeared in the New Zealand Times recently: THE CONVERSION OF SIR JAMES ALLEN. Sir James Allen left this country a short while ago in the full blaze of prohibitionist glory. He had represented for years the Bruce constituency, which, having taken him to its bosom in its dry days, kept him there long after it became wet. Tn loyalty to their common cause, he favored the prohibition referendum, so energetically enforced by the men who had no patience for the ordinary law. He did. more, much more, for the cause, beginning by startling this country with a prohibitionary pronouncement on the eve of a genera] election, and ending by imposing prohibition on our new dependency of Samoa, not through the operation of the New Zealand laws which were to be extended to that country, but by his own arbitrary will. Having thus proclaimed his faith in “Prohibition, prohibition, and always prohibition,” he departed, as wo have said, in the blaze of prohibition glory to represent this Dominion at the seat of Empire. The other day, his duties taking him to Geneva, he took his seat with the League of Nations, presumably still in the limelight of prohibition.

Sitting thus shining, he heard Lord Robert Cecil take up his favorite cause. Tn the course of his speech, Lord Robert unlifted aspirations for a teetotal world. Lord Robert lectured the national representative*. They had disappointed him. He would have liked them to follow the Allen Samoan example by proclaiming, inter alia, “the prohibition of the sale of alcohol throughout the world.” We quote from the report of the London Times. Thereupon a strange thing happened. Sir James did not rush forward to embrace the cause and good Sir Robert. On the contrary, he switched off the prohibition limelight, rose up in the damp darkness, and smote the prohibitionist champion hip and thigh. “He did not” (we again quote the Times report) “agree with Lord Robert on the liquor question. He knew, by experience, that where the population had been deprived, of liquor they resented the injustice, and manufactured the liquor a state of things which was worse than before.” Injustice! The thing that had kept him in BruCe; the thing he had tried to foist on New Zealand; the thing he had forced arbitrarily on Samoa; that thing was “Injustice.” How amazing! But experience had converted him. He knew by experience that the victims of this injustice invariably contrived to show their resentment by setting up evils far worse than the liquor traffic of which they had been unjustly deprived. What experience? Did he get it in Bruce, or in Samoa, or, vicariously, if not personally, in the United States and Canada? Wherever he got the experience, it seems to have converted him. Whether or not with the help of the banquets, luncheons, breakfasts, smoke concerts, and routs, offered with hospitable profusion to representative guests wherever they go, who can pretend to say? The main thing is his conversion, complete enough to condemn his own conduct in New Zealand and Samoa, and the legislation of the Congress in the United States of America. Having made dry as much of« the world as he could, Sir James went, in the blaze of prohibition limelight, to Geneva, and there strongly protested against the proposal of a distinguished statesman to dry the whole earth, even to the extent of denouncing as unjust, mischievous, and rightly to be resisted: that which he had tried to impose on one country and had forced on another. It certainly i* a remarkable conversion.