TEMPERANCE ITEMS.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume XIII, Issue 4185, 6 August 1892, Page 3

TEMPERANCE ITEMS.

A correspondt-nt having written to Sir Wilfrid Lawson asking him what reason he had to suppose that a Liberal Government in the future would do any better with respect to Temperance legislation than the last Government did, Sir Wilfrid in reply said: "My principal reason for thinking bo is because I expect that a House of Commons will be returned more in earnest ngainst the liquor traffic than any House of Commons which we have hud previously, and that it will render it necessary ior any Government to deal with the matter in accordance with the programme of the Liberal party.

. MrJuo. Craig, in a Duudeo journal, writes;—" The following facts may be of some use to your readers to help them lo realise how very injurious the liquor traffic is to the best interests of working men :-It is calculated that thedistilleries of Scotland turn out annually, JGIO,OOO,OCO worth of tpirits, and the vast amount is manufactured by only 2,000 persons; whereas, from railway traffic returns, we learn that for. the same volume in railway traffic—£lo,ooo,ooo—no less than 50,000 men find employment. Then, if we examine some of the trades for the preparation or production of articles of use and general requirement, we find that they far exceed the forty per cent, allowed. The fishing industry is marked by a oaso in point, for it is calculated that £10,000,000 worth offish would give employment to 180,000 persons. We 3GD then that for every £10,000,000 spent on liquor —and we spent fourteen times that last year—instead of on fish, wo keep 184,000 persons idle. Is npt this a olaar proof that drunkenness is the cause of bad trade ? and the working man who spends his wages on alcohol 1 instead of on fish is an enoroy to life c|aes, and a drag on the progress of labour ?

AJ one time there was a question of establishing a national creed (said the Bishop of Exeter the other day in an account he was giving of bis traveh ifi Japan), aud tt Minister was sent to Europe to investigate the subject; but he returned reporting that Christianity did not seem more efficacious in lepressitig drunkenness and vice than Buddhism.

In an article on the alleged inoreaso of drunkenness, the Middlesox County Times says;-" The question of State interference is not so easily waived away by insisting on the rights of liborty, When a bishop famous in his day for something more than Irish eloquence threw out the sophism that he would rather see England free ihan England' sober, it 1 was felt that" this was ; buying our liberty at too dear a price.' The limits of ►liberty as"all must alloy, are passed whep/a man js left free to majfe a beast of himself, and 'bring his wife and children (o pauperism and crime. The criminality would then be on the State which, by its guilty connivance at the drink tralUo, could allow such a state of things to go on unchecked."

Ih B. W. Bichardson recently gave some interesting facta about suicide, Tho Jews are the least prone to it, the Scandinavians most so. Dull weather increases suicides, thougljJFflfcriiary is the freest month andthe last four days of June give the heaviest records of the year. Men prefer firearms, women poison: men are most suicidal from tbirtjf to forty,

womon from twenty to thirty; wealth and poverty havo littlo todo with it; but excitement induces it,..and the widowed aro more often led to it than nro tho married. Ptoteßiants»r« more liuhlit to aiiio'dai mania than Roman Catholics, The doctor «upg<Bts as preventives-total abstinence from alcohol, from gambling, from ilio struggle for wk»Hli and from controversial theology.