IS NO-LICENSE ACCORDING TO HUMAN NATURE, OR IS IT CONTRARY TO IT?

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 3039, 9 November 1908, Page 5

IS NO-LICENSE ACCORDING TO HUMAN NATURE, OR IS IT CONTRARY TO IT?

My No-License v friends will kindly read this article as carefully as it is respectfully written. What is human nature? The answer is that every man is created a morally responsible creature. In dealing with every man, therefore, you must treat him, if you desire to improve him, along the lines of his own life. The moment you begin to compel him, that moment you interfere with his responsibility. Whenever you assume that he is incapable of guiding himself you cut away the foundations on which he stands as a responsible moral being. What is the good of responsibility if you are to hedge a man round with four square walls and give him nothing to eat and drink but what you can see to be for his good? Such a man will grow up a hothouse plant, but not a moral being. Now, to help a man you must carefully consider his whole life, his history, his environment, and the environment in which he has been educated, and along these lines infuse into him a stronger lite, a purer character, nobler aims, higher ideals, and you are making him a man. He will become temperate, sober, manly.' No-License is opposed to all these, and therefore opposed to manliness and temperance. THE FAILURE OF NO-LICENSE IN INVERCARGILL. A writer in Invercargill, who knows the town well, published a number of articles in the "Evening Star" recently, in which he shows that NoLicense there has been a failure for the following reasons: — 1. It has in no way stopped drinking, which goes on exactly the same as before. 2. (t was said that No-License would remove the temptation from youths, but unfortunately in Invercargill considerable contrary evidence can be obtained, and anyone can therefore see that the temptations to women, to youths, and to girls, are now far greater. j

3. It was held that No-License would make drunkenness less easy of attainment, but this gentleman affirms that the roads that lead to intoxication in Invercargill are many, wide, and free from any serious difficulty. 4. In one of the temperance boarding-houses lately in Ipvercargill there was committed an outrage too loathsome to name, and in the haunts of drunkenness, drunkenness leaves its stain as of yore. 5. Prohibition in Invercargill only conceals what is done, and this concealment is the fatal thing in the \,hole business. 6. No-License is like the devil we don't know—that is, the devil of drinking- by stealth, the drinking under prohibition. 7. The arguments to confirm NoLicense are ridiculously unconvincing so far as Invercargill is concerned. *