THE PROHIBITIONIST.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume XII, Issue 4005, 6 January 1892, Page 2

THE PROHIBITIONIST.

Fublbkd by the courtesy of the Editor of Wairarapa DaVy under the auspices of the New Zealand Alliance for the prohibitum of the liquor traffic, Mas-, tcrton Auxilhry. When ratepayers demand iht entire extinction oj all places, for the sale of ■ liqiwrsthir prayer shouUbe granted. —Charles Bmlon, Brewer. [Oonimunioations tor this column must bo addressed to "Tho Prohibitionist"care of Editor of WAiitiiiirA Daih.] The following testimonies of work* ihg men were delivered in the. presence of the Rev Newman Hall, of London, principally at meetings Of or which he presided as chairman. They are reported in a condensed form, but as nearly as possible in the words of the speakers. 0. M,, Blacksmith.—l am a blacksmith's hamraer»mati.'-. Pre swung a hammer, weighing twenty-two poundß m front of hot fire, without beer, the last fourteen yiars, I see sovoral hammer-.uen here to-night, my shopmates. Let them say if 1 haven't done my work as well na any of them, Some said when I signed, that I should soon want a.wooden Buit. Here lam, strong, healthy, hearty, and. happy ; and I feel fourteen years younger to-day than I did fourteen years ago. Whatever I could .do before on beer,l can do ten'times better on water. They thought no one could swing a hammer without intoxicating drink. But they huvenot tried, 'When I signed, no one, could tell which was theoriginal piece in my pair of trowsers, It looked 1 as if! ithad been taken, in'in numbers, Keep your money for yourselves and don't spend it in drink. Look, after youi families. Then you will always be able to get a fair day's wage for a fair day's labor. Sitting at (he publio bar with a pipe in your mouth singing '' Rule Britannia," isn't the way, to reform abuses, 150,000 workmen go to bed drunk every Saturday night in London alone, If they spend 8s eaoh there is £22,500. This .would buy 920,000 quartern loaves: ■ They would be better in your houses than giving the money to Mr Bo'nny-faoa at tho publio; house, " Sweet Home" indeed I Home is miserable through drink, and the children half Btarved, :'

S,R., b'ergeant-Major, Royal Artillery.— I Have been nineteen years a soldier, and sixteen of those a teeto-* taller. I have been in long inarobes, in hot countries, in the West Indies, and in all weathers. This fiery riim sends the men mad. For live years I met not a single person to encourage me except four American saito's on board a transport. A young man in ray regiment rose to a lucrative position, but became a drunkard, and died of drink,'saying': "Rum I thou hast robbed me of all, and now, fiend of the devil, wilt thou send my soul to belli" Drink is the slave driver, lashing its victims and keeping them to their work, But we've brought our guns to bear on the system, and a breach has already been made. Who will say teetotallisra is not good ? It's practioal, safe, Scriptural, and thank God, available for eyeryono. As the result of Mr G.osohen's illstarred compensation sobeuie, says the PattMall Gazette, one fact stands out too clearly to be missed even by the staunchest ally of the publican. That is, that no Parliament nowaday*— Unionist, Tory, Reactionary, however it may be classed—will ever dream of paying compensation for the extinction of licenses out of publio funds. Everyone remembers bow ingenious Mr Goschen's proposal was. It bad all the shrewdness—or, as some would say, the trickiness—of its inventor, Ho proposed first to add to the revenue a sum from the liquor trailio itself, and then to devote one-third of the amount to a compensation fund destined to return to the pockets whence it came, Talk about robbing Peter to pay Paul—Mr Goschen hoped to dazzle and delude the teetotal fanatic by fleecing Paul to compensate Paul, and presenting Peter as a solatium with funds which Poter had contributed himself. But we know the risks of " the best laid schemes of lnioe and men j" and the mehncholy history of the compensation clauses, is it not written in the "Book of Hansard?" No future Government will be in a hurry to burn its fingers with the question which Mr Goschen and his colleagues so precipitately dropped.

There is no class in-this community that suffers more from the drink traffic than working men. Take two or three well-known items ofinfor* mation about the employment that the drink traffio furnishes, Mr W. S. Caiso quotes the case of a distillery where the annual value of the drink amounted to £1,000,000, while only 660 men were employed in the manufacture. In the iron ore works in which he is himself interested tho annual turnover was only 1250,000, but the men employed amounted to 1200. With an equal turnover, this trade would find work and wages for more than seven times as many men. Mr Geo, White, sheriff of Norwich, told some years ago of a small brewery that employed 20 men. The owner died, and tho new owner transferred the capital to an agricultural implement business and employod 120 men—six.times as many. He quoted the balance sheet of a brewery with a net annual profit of £24,560, who paid in wages and BaiarieS'£6,4o2, or about' one-fourth of the net profits. In his own manufacturing' jnisinesss he found that tho'wages'on an average were five tiihea as great as tho profits. With'an equal capital the manufactory would pay twenty times'as much as tlie brewery. Evidence like this might he continued for many sources, The jnferenpß is unavoidable that if the .drink trade were stopped, and the piirphasers' money Bpent on other things, there would be a greater amount paid in wages and a greater number of people employed. There would be fewer people unemployed, and therefore fewer maintained at the expense'of others,. There would be mo'ro people with wages to Bpend, and they would expend them in some useful! frade, Money expended by pop'ulatfnn-jn otjjer words,' by ji population haying raoderj ate ingomes—ifjt be wisely spent in place of being wasted : pn strong drink and its kindred evils, is spent mainly on three' classes of things that serve j for food, clothing and shelter, and the branches of industry tbat'produce these and their kindred comforts, are the kind, jhat eropjoy large numbers of It is thp plain'duty of Opvornnients, says the VenArohdeacon Farrar, to protect the interests of the poorest and weakest who are. at least; represented in them; to save us from that deadliest and most despicable of all '. form ,of rule the: tyrannies \oi strong and ; united?: fraud; to protect men from [the wrong? oi others, and if need./ be,

evon from the vices of 'themselves. Men talk of a /ate/airepolioy, but i laissez-faire 'policy is in plain Eng> lisb a do-nothing policy. .In other words,it is,ho policy;at nil. It consists merely in not doing, and not letting others do. It is to throw the reins loose upon the neck oi headstrong selfishness. It is to leave us victims to powerful rings of organised monopolists, supporting by ill-gotteu wealth, immoral interests, Those who would have Government inactive for moral-protection and for social advancement, stigmatise State contro as interference, and philanthropic legislation as grandmotherly. Well, I pity the man, and I pity the State that is daunted by- epigrams; ; Is it, or is it not, true that what is morally, wrong cannot be politically right? Is it, or is it not, the duty of Governments to make it easy to do rigSt and difficult 1 to do wrong?. If thai, be grandmotherly, I say that such legislation has given us some of the nob* lest'ineasures in the Statute book,, thatit'hosbeen entirely, bßnefioeht, aud entirely Cbristliko, Itvas suoh legislation which emancipated hun-'. dreds and thousands of poor slaves. It was suoh legislation which declared that our brave sailors should not be sent to sea in floating coffins; thai women bent do*ble when still young should not be harnessed to trucks like beasts of.burden in-.the galleries of our black collieries ar.d mines; that little .children, should not be blighted before their time by ignorance and- ' slavery; that the,, many ■? should; not be robbed of rights, eternal and indefensible, by the greed of the few ; that the bread of the poor should not be Bcanted for the gain's of the farmer; that brutal sports should not demoralise the 'callous hearts of the multitude; that the leprosy of impuro literature should not be disseminated broadcast among corrupt thousands; that gambling houses should not bo the portals of ruin and of suicide, nor haunts of vileness flaunt themselves like the gatei of hell. Whether that be grandmotherly legislation or not I know not, but if it bo, I for one prefer it to the legislation of the prodigal and of the publican.