THE NO-LICENSE FALLACY.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 3045, 16 November 1908, Page 5

THE NO-LICENSE FALLACY.

(To the Editor.)

Sir,—l have lived thirty-two years in Masterton, and during this time I have seen many changes. On the whole I have found that Masterton was a very good place to live in. The last six or seven years have been especially good ones; every resident knows that—the labourer, the tradesman and the professional man can all look back with satisfaction on those last few years. Many of the fine old settlers that I have worked with are now dead and gone. We never thought in those days that we were committing a sin if we had a glass of beer; in fact, I never knew that Masterton was in need of saving from its sins till within the last few months. The hardy old settlers of those days knew how to work; they started out to subdue the wilderness of bush, when there was no roads, no bridges, no trains, no cabs, no coaches, no telegraph lines, nor telephones. If we had an old bullock sledge we thought we were very lucky, and I might say that we never saw a NoLicense lecturer in those days. lam not suggesting, for a moment, that those gentlemen are atraid of roughing it, but it is a suggestive fact all the same that I have never met a NoLicense lecturer in * bush falling camp, a gang of road contractors, or in a shingle pit. I have noticed, Sir, that the reformer, the No-License reformer, the kind we get in Masterton at least, is mostly a sleek gentleman who manages to arrive when most of the hard work of settlement :is over. I have also noticed that he I usually arrives in a nice comfortable first-elass railway Carriage. There was no first-class carriages in the good old days. Anyhow, if we are to believe all that these gentlemen tell us, Masterton is just now in a very bad way indeed, and it wants saving very badly, and it is not the old settle who climbed over the Rimutaka and scrambled through a rough fern track to h*Ja little rough whare, and who made the roads and bridged the rivers, anj generally made M£?terton the prosperous little town It Is today—these mefli ftfe men who made it, are not good enough" td save it. But instead, a lawyer ffdnii Uune"din, and a land agent from ChfMc'bureh, must come along to show us hoW to do things. We used to consider thai if a fellow had a bout with a lawyer' he usually got a few feathers knocked out, if after that he had a round or two with a land agent there would, as a rule, not be many feathers left on him, for, for instance, a hotelkeeper to pick at; and yet a Dune3in lawyer and a Christchurch land agent are, so they say, trying to save us from the Masterton hotelkeepers. We have had No-License rammed down our throats pretty constantly for the last little while. I think a good many electors will remember that they got along pretty well, and accomplished a fair amount of useful work without any assistance from No-License, and seeing it has not helped us through the rough times that are past, we will be able to do without it in the future. —I am, etc., PIONEER.