OF TEMPERANCE HOTELS.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9063, 11 April 1908, Page 6

OF TEMPERANCE HOTELS.

' (By Frank Morton). This Week they have opened, in Wellington, what is (1 am informed) the largest and finest temperance hotel in the dominion. It is a splendid building, the furnishings are excellent, every modern convenience has been installed, the position is central. There is, in short, no apparent reason why the hotel should not be a positive success; and yet—and yet I wonder how it is that the more one travels the less one is able, to associate the average temperance hotel with the idea of comfort. I am a person quite without prejudices. I am on inveterate total abstainer. I love a secluded atmosphere and a quiet life. I hate the squalors and the accidents of drunkenness. And yet, being a man with a preference for comfort and comfortable society, I would at any time stay in the most modest tavern, rather than in the most palatial temperance hotel. You understand, of course, that I am speaking simply on the basis of my own experience. I gladly assume that this great place in Wellington is going to be every, thing that the temperance hotels of my experience have not been. The temperance hotels of my experience have all been boarding-houses, overgrown or underdone. I dislike .board-ing-houses. So do you. The board-ing-house is one of the dreadful necessities that a strictly limited income, or a rigid and inordinate frugality, imposes upon certain poor human creatures. In a boardingliouse, do what you will, you are treated as one of the family; the treatment being generally the more exasperating by reason of the fact that there is no family at all, in the true sense. In a boarding-house, when the food is good, the cooking is generally sxecrable and, as a rule, the food in, not good. In those rare boarding-houses where the cooking is tolerable, it is infinitely difficult to get enough to eat. xhere is, too, a certain clammy hostility in the atmosphere that gnaws like an acid on the nerves o£ the quiet soul. The beds never feel aired, the blankets are pcrubby, in every room you smell the greasy kitchen. The ventilation is defective, the water in the bathroom is never hot, and often enough the drains are sourly eloquent. The serviettes are coarse, the linen is not immaculate. The service is of an unpardonable badness. Well — and I am still speaking strictly by the book of my own experience—in the temperance hotel you have the traditional defects of the boardinghouae exuberant in exaggeration. And I am driven to the conclusion that the trouble lies less with the temperance hotel than with its frequenters. In the ordinary hotel, you can generally find somebody more or less entertaining. You will invariably come across the new type of commercial traveller; which, despite all humorous disparagements, is a very good type indeed. The servants, however humble, will generally be brisk and pleasant. The accommodation, however rough, will be comfortable. I have worried myself quite a lot in the effort to discover wherein this broad difference lies between temperance hotels and hotels which (shall we say?) are not of necessity or inclination especially temperate. And I have arrived at no justifiable conclusion yet. It may be that when one goes to a temperance hotel one is always deliberately virtuous. One goes because there is nowhere else to go, and so makes a barren virtue of necessity. Or one goes because Drink is a curse, and one is virtuously determined not to countenance Drink. In any case, one is tempted to self-righteousness, and falls insensibly into every pitfall of an apish conscious virtue. Mind you, I am not in any sense prejudging the Wellington palace of propriety. I hope that it will be wonderfully successful, with all the comforts of a home in reality as well as in the prospectus. But in Australia the temperance hotels are like refrigerators that have soured from disuse, and I have stayed and suffered in some of them. In London, in the vicinity of the British Museum, there are the Thackeray Hotel, the Kingsley Hotel, and the Esmond Hotel, all conducted on strictly temperance principles, an:! all (as I am credibly assured) delightfully comfortable. I have not stayed in these houses; and, in any case, it is admitted by travelled folk that they are notable exceptions to the rule that so depresses. They are the preferred haunts of cosmopolitans who love that neighbourhood and seek for quiet. Their tariffs, albeit reasonable, axe reasonably high. Their cookery becomes famous. In India, again, where there are the most dismal boarding-houses in the world, there are no temperance hotels. There is no need for them, in a country where every man keeps at least (jne bottle of his own. But there are dak bungalows in remote places. The dak bungalow is the queerest and saddest house of entertainment in the world. You take your own servants, and you pay for your rooms on a fixed scalo. Your meals are cooked and serve 1 to your order by the servants in charge of the bungalow, who a:e invariably great rogues. The atmosphere of the place is, as a rule, almost unimaginably morose and forbidding. The guests who come and go are sick, or drunk, or dangerous, or harassed with affairs. Nobody expects comfort, because of the fleas. Mosquitoes one may baffle, more or less. Snakes and centipedes and various large 1 obtrusive insects, one may ignore or cast out; but the multitudinous strong flea there is no escaping. In this connection, my memory of one dak bungalow, up in the hot and humid State of Behar, is very vivid. Three or four of us, newspap?rmen, wero on tour with a magnate, and there was a day or two to waste. Things were very dull, and we hal tired absolutely of each others' company, when a red and choleric military man came along. This man was utterly unapproachable, and because he had been in dak bungalows before, he carried his own bedding. We were annoyed by his exclusiveness and style; so we gathered a wine-glassful of flea«, and turned them loose among his mattresses. I happened to be awake when his language crashed upon the : solemn silence of the deep night, and I gathered that he was not pleased.