Temperance Column.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume IV, Issue 201, 10 May 1902, Page 3

Temperance Column.

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(Published by arrangement.) THE COSTS OF DRINK AND WAR COMPARED. We learn by cable dated Loudon, Apr! Sill, from the returns just published, that of 2937 ofiicers and 08,311 men invalided from South Africa, 7-178 died and 5202 were discharged as unfit lor duty. The total deaths in South A.rica were as follows : Officers. Men. Killed in action .. .. 502 6114 Died of wounds .. .. 176 1774 Died in captivity .. 6 47 Died of disease... .. 313 12,403 Accidental deaths ... 2 4 543 1,020 19.931 1,020 Total deaths ... 20,795 The Evening Post, reporting a meeting at Kilbirnio, on April 10, said : Mr A. R. Atkinson, M.H.R., and the Rev F. W. Isitt, ware tin speduus at the hlipuc meeting held under the auspices of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union at Kilbirnio last night. Mr F. J. W. Fear occupied the chair. Both speakers drew their illustrations of the temperance question ehielly from the wan Mr Atkinson said that terrible as was the financial burden imposed by the war, it was trilling compared with the cost of the liquor traffic. The latest official estimate gave £146,081,000 as the cost of the war up to the 3lst March, but the drink bill of the United Kingdom was £101,000,000 for one year. From the stand point of the mortality involved the contrast was still more striking. The t >tal deaths in our forces in South Africa were 20,951 up to the end of March, but, according to Dr Norman Kerr’s estima.eof 120,000 as the deaths duo every year to liquor in the United Kingdom,

3000,300 had died from that, cause since the beginning of ihe war. The liquor traffic had killed over two months as many as the war had killed in two years and a half. Mr Isitt pointed out that the figures given by Mr Atkin-on took an even m°re serious aspect when the expenditure of the British people throughout the Empire, and their death rate through drink, were considered. Supposing the Athenic, the largest vessel that had yet visited New Zealand waters, to have cost £220,000, the British people might b did over 2000 such ships with the money they spent in drink during the two and a half years of the war. If they had immediately sunk the whole in mid-Atlantic they would have saved, not only 330,000 lives, bat a vast amount of money now wasted on j the criminals, lunatics, paupers, and other victims of the liquor traffio.