DRINK AND CRIME.

Waikato Argus, Volume IV, Issue 283, 3 May 1898, Page 4

DRINK AND CRIME.

TO TIIK EDITOK. .SIR,—Iu reply to your correspondent, I cannot do better than give you the following quotation from niy discourse on the occasion referred to. —I am, etc., John Hoskiku. Wesleyan Parsonage, Hamilton, lot May, 1898. Another factor in our estimate is the crime for which the tratlic is responsible. The late Mr Justice Richmond said at Napier in 1892 that *' nearly two-thirds of all the crimes in the country were due to drink." The gaoler at Napier said not long ago : " Eighty per cent, of the people who come to tins place are sent heie through drink. If there were no drink my occupation would soon be gone." Lord Chief Justice Coleridge, speaking from the bench of the English .Supreme Court in 1881, affirmed : " But for the drink we might shut up nine out of ten of our pri-ons. Every ciime has its origin, more or less, in drunkenness." Mr Justice Hawkins, at the Durham Assizes, July Kith, 1895, said : "Every diiy I live, the more I think of the matter, the more firmly do I come to the conclusion that the root of almo3t every crime is driDk—that revolting tyrant that affects people of all ages and of both ?exes ; young, middle-aged, and old, father and son, husband anil wife, all in turn become its victims. 1 believe tint nine-tenths of the crime in this country is engendered inside the doors of publichouses." Baron Huddlestonc, in his charge to the Grand Jury at the Birmingham Ass'zes oti February 24th, 1887, said : " Diiok, directly or indirectly, is the cause of almost every crime." Lord Wolseley said, in relat'oii to the British Army, not long ago : " Minety pet cent, of the crime of the army is through dri:.k." Baron Dowse said at Wieklow, IS7S, "If our people were more sober, I think that crime would almost entirely disaappear from our midst." Judge Denniston said in Christchurch some years ago, " That drunkenness is a cancer in the body politic." If that be so, the eooner our Judges and Magistrates got free from all association with the traffic the better for the country. It is a disgrace to see brewers being made

J.P.'s in our colony, when they are engaged in creating the criminals they are called to adjudicate upon. A tratlic creating cancers is a menace to any community. It is evideut we must charge the liquor revenue with a large percentage of the costs of crime to the country. Suppose we put it at 75 per cent. Our police and justice cost the country at the year we arj speaking of, £220,000 ; 75 per cent, of that would he £165,000, with which we must debit the revenue of the traffic in estimating its commercial value to the Stato. Another factor to be considered is the lunacy attributable to the liquor traffic. This is very difficult to estimate. In outnational system of items get intermixed, and it is ve:y difficult to disentangle them. Suppose one case. A female patient is in the asylum who has been temperate. She was driven there by a drunken husband. Her charges arc not set against the drink. She costs the State, s'>y £26 per annum. Her five children are taken to the Industrial School, the father being arrested for a crime he committeed in a fit of intoxica tion. These children have to be fed, clothed and educated at the expense of the State. The man has to be kept in prison. The Education Vote, the Charitable Vote, the Lunacy Vote and the Crime Vote are all effected by this man's drinking. I mention this to show how difficult it is to estimate, even approximately, the cost of the traffic to the country. In 1859, Lord Shaftesbury, who for 50 years was on the Commission iu Lunacy and permanent Chairman since 1845 up to the time of his death, testified before a Parliamentary Committee that 50 per cent, of the cas.is admitted to asylums in England were due to drink. A shoit time before his death he Btated in the House of Lords that fully six tenths of the cases arose from no other cause than intemperance. Mi Mulhall, the statistician, in a paper on Insanity in the Contemporary Review, .Time, 18S3, numbers 25,800 idiots in the United Kingdom as owing their unhappy eouditiou to drunken parents. During the Franco-German war, Mr Lunier touud that 55 per cent, of the cases of insanity which were in the Paris Hospitals at one time were due to alcohol alone. From reports of Hospitals and Luuatic Asylums at St. Petersburg, Dublin, Liverpool, Colney Hatch, and other places, it is shown thac above half the' patients admitted are the victims of intemperance, either their own or that of others, while for the whole of England and Scotland Dr. W. A. F. Browne has calculated that about onc-forth of the cases of insanity are directly attributable to the use of alcohol. It has been recently Btated on the highest authority that three-fourths of the idiots boin are the offspring of intemperate parents. Charles Darwin says : chronic diseases arise from the use cf ardent spirits, they are liable to become hereditary, even to the third generation." We are not far out in charging the liquor with one half of the lunacy of the world and of the colony. Its revenue should be debited with one half of the costs of the lunacy department. This is fixed at £53,000 in New Zealand, and one half of that is £26,500.