PROHIBITION.

Temuka Leader, Issue 2440, 20 December 1892, Page 4

PROHIBITION.

TO THE EDITOR. Sik, —Thomas Carlyle said that there •were thirty millions of people in Great Britain—mostly fools. There are not quite as many fools in New Zealand because there are not quite as many people, but we are a 3 much given to fads as our progenitors, the contemporaries of Thomas Carlyle, were. Every right-thinking man and woman cannot but desire the abolition of drunkenness; the ills that accompany that vice are manifest to all—so much so that recapitulation of them seems to me to be mere waste of time. Prohibition is a fad that will—l think—greatly retard the abolition of drunkenness. To talk about prohibiting the liquor traffic before drunkenness is abolished is puerile nonsense ; it is like putting the cart before the borne. We are told that it has been a success where it has got a fair trial in America. Far off fowls have fair feathers, fuid. aye autil we gst tfww. I submit

that as a remedy for drunkenness Prohibition has never had a fair trial, A local trial is not a fair trial. For instance, if selling drink were prohibited in one district, drunkenness may cease in that district by being transferred to an unprohibited district. Prohibition over a whole nation would be its true test if it was worth testing, but there is not a shadow of reason for believing that it wjII cure drunkenness. It is like a superstructure with a foundation of sand, its bases being the erroneous opinion that public-houses are the cause of drunkenness. There wasn’t a public-house in the world when Noah got drunk, and drunkenness prevailed throughout Christendom more than a thousand years before there was a licensed grog-shop therein ; and, moreover, it never has prevailed but in Christendom, and in all my experience I have never seen a grog shop successfully run unless there was a Christian Church near by. We have five Churches and five hotels in Temuka. Therefore it seems to me that the Church and drunkenness must be effects of the same cause, or that one must be the cause of the other. And I unhesitatingly assert that the doctrine of substitution is largely responsible for the mental and moral conditions compatible with drunkenness. At all hazards we must discover the cause, and go to the root of the evil before we can get a radical cure; it is not to be voted out of the world so easily as many appear to think. See yonder oak, that has been spreading his roots in the ground for a hundred years ! I see in imagination a lot of monkeys jumping round the forest king, chattering and gesticulating, and making a great ado. They resemble the men we hear talk of the great things they are to do when they have a sufficient number of us educated up to their fad; how easily they are to rid the world of this moral cancer of more than five thousand years growth. We can listen with patience to a child telling the great things he is to do when he is a man. But it makes me sad to think how little progress can be made while there is so little between the child and the man. If our prohibition friends would let us see a little of the great good they are to accomplish, we would at least have some hope of getting them out of the way of reforms. —I am, etc., Neutral.