WAIMATE’S DRINK BILL.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume IV, Issue 180, 20 March 1902, Page 3

WAIMATE’S DRINK BILL.

TO TIILO EDITOR Sir, — Absence from Waimate prevented my having the pleasure of nerusing ,l Abstainer's ” thoughtful letter until this morning, but if you do not consider it too late in the day for me to Hfiv a few words in reply, I shall be oblig d by your inserting the following remarks. “ Abstainer’s ” scent for “ red herrings ” does not seem to bo particularly keen, or I would remind him that the best way of getting rid of these fish is to eat them, not to “ fry ” them, However, us he is bent on taking every word seriously, I will now treat the subject absolutely in that way, as indeed it deserves. “Abstainer” says that “ the high and the mighty, the educated, the wealthy, and oft times the religious are brought low as well as the poor and hard worked and uneducated people ”by drink. Does “Abstainer” mean to say for one moment that the former classes supply one-tenth as mvny victims to drink as the latter ? There may be occasional lapses into drunkenness even in the upper classes of society, but it is not from these classes tint tho growing army of drunkards is recruite 1, That army’s ranks are tilled day by day by the poor, the ignorant and tho unhappy. The chief reason, to my mind, why all the efforts of all the temperance reformers are of so little avail is that these men and women trill underrate the social factors and overrate the physic d factor of the “ craving for drink.” 1 do not deny the vile powerfulness of this last, but I say that the prevalence of drunkenness among the lowest and poorest classes of society and its comparative absence among the well to do, shows c'early that when a man’s life is full and free and healthy and .happy he is not at all likely to become a drunkard. I agree with “ Abstainer ” that it is useless to attempt to reclaim tho habitual drunkard while the drink shop is in our midst, hut I think also that it is futile to imagine that we can stop men drinking while poverty and misery and ignorance abound on all sides To-night there are thousands aid thousands of men and women, our brothers and sisters, in all the great cities of the Old World, lying four, five, six in a room, some shivering, some starving, some sick, some dying—all miserable, ignorant, poor, unhappy. And as in the Old World so in tho New ; as in London and Glasgow, so in New York and Chicago, the cold, slimy serpents of vice and immorality, of ignorance and disease, ctawling through the sloughs and morasses of poverty and never-ending toil and death, poisoning the deepest heart’s blood and ernshing the life from body and mini with their envenomed folds. And so on from New York and Chicago through all the beauty and the wealth and all the filth and die vileness of San Francisco across to our own towns of Melbourne and Sydney, and into the alums there “ worse than Whitechapel,” to places such as those recently visited by the Sydney authorities: “The doorway was only three feet high, and the ceiling so low that even the smallest alderman in the council felt it incumbent upon him to how his head in order to escape conflict with the boards,” and in this den, which was in “a terrible state of dilapidation,” there had lived an old woman and her daughters for twenty years (their present rental being Ss a week) ! and all around yards and alleys which were “ nothing more nor less than fertile breeding grounds for plague and any other sort of disease.” Now, does “Abstainer” seriously tell me that the most important thing to do for these women would bs to prohibit them obtaining drink? Would they be benefited in the very least by being deprived of u ? Further, are these women some of the “many who suffer great pain, great sorrow and hardship, yet often and often they are made more humble, hopeful, kind men and wome i by the ordeal ”? What ? Fly to alcohol for relief, for oblivion ! Certainly—and after that the grave. These are the conditions which must be remedied before the drink evil, the social evil, or any oilier evil will over be wiped out. They exist, latent or active, wherever has spread the h ighfing mildew of modern civilisation, with all its splendour and its squalour, its capitalism and its wage-slavery, its weabh and its poverty, and all “ the ignorance, the vice, the crime, and the brutality that spring from poverty and the fear of poverty ” ; but they are conditions which man c m, must, will remedy, th mgh not while he makes wild, unfounded assertions about drink being the cause of nine-tenths of all the poverty and miserv in the world, nor while, like “ Abstainer.” he rolls out puerile and irrelevant platitudes about the ennobling effects of poverty and hardship and sorrow ; denies any concern in the building of temples and halls, and gives vent to palpable untruths as to its not being within the power of man to make his fellow-men happy. In short, wo do nob want our leaders to be temperance reformers only; we want them to be social reformers, thinkers, men and women who have sufficient breadth oi mind to see that the property problem and the labour problem and the military problem and the sex problem and tho religious problem and the education problem and the drink problem are all bound up together and must be attacked together, and that to do this they must get back tp “ first principles ” and make good the foundations of society before they attempt to rebuild its superstructures. Formerly temperance reformers attempted to reclaim the drunkard by total abstinence pledges, &o.; then they advanced to the demand for the shutting up of the drink shops and the turning off of the supply of drink. They have yet to advance to the work of eradicating the social conditions which breed the desire for drink. 1 Until this is done the cry of thousands will be that of the lotus-eaters—- “ Let us alone. Death is the end of life.

Ah why should life all labour be ? ” Now, just one word in conclusion, for to all this I tear “Abstainer” will reply that “ first principles ” are not within the range of practical politics, and prohibition now is, and that the point we have to decide upon is License or No License- Well, personally, in small places like Waimate, with its present social and economic conditions, I say unhesitatingly No. License. In large towns or provinces I am inclined to think, even apart from the reasons I

have referred to above, prohibition is a mistake, because it cannot ne, aud is i ot, enforced, being t m ran ;h in advance of public opinion, and nothing can lie more demoralising than the enactment of laws which are to be constantly atulh fliitually broken.—l am. etc., E. Id.