QUESTION OF THE AGE.

Waikato Times, Volume XXX, Issue 2456, 7 April 1888, Page 2 (Supplement)

QUESTION OF THE AGE.

(New York Tribune.)

It has been said that the end and the test of good government is the greatest happiness of the greatest number. If this \>o

true, it must be owned that no government extant is satisfactorily conducted. For observation shows that an a rule political energy is expended upon secondary concerns, while politicians em-

ploy all dexterity in avoiding action upon tho greatest problems which most deeply involve the destinies of the masses. There

18 to-day in the English-speaking countries no such tremendous, far-reaching, vital question as that of drunkenness. In its implications and effects it ovor shadows all else. It is impossible to examine any subject connected with the progress, tho civilization, the physical well-being l , tho religious condition of the masses, without encountering this monstrous evil. It is at the centre of all social and political mischief. It paralyses beneficent energies in every direction It neutralises educational energies. It silences the voice of religion. It baffles penal reform. It rears aloft a mass of evilly-inspired power which at every salient point threatens social and national advance ; which gives to ignorance and vies a greater potency than intelligence and virtue can command ; which deprives the poor of the advantages of modern progress ; which debauches and degrades millions, brutalizing 1 and soddening them below the plane of healthy savagery, and filling tho centres of population with oreatures whose condition almost excuses the immortality which renders them dangerous to their generation. All these evils, all this mischief, all this destruction of human souls and intellects are going on among us daily and hourly. There are none so ignorant or inattentive as not to have personal experience of some of them ; some hearth darkened ; some family scattered ; some loving heart broken ; some promising career ruined j some deed of shame done. Yet how hard it is to get tho gigantic evil seriously attackod. Temperance organisations have indeed been fighting it for years. \'et popular inertia have resisted from their utmost efforts ; but has all been done by tho organised agencies that ropresent tho higher life ?

What are doctrinal points, for example, compared to this ovor present, ever active insidious influence ? What are sectarian differences by the eide of this national curso ? Can the Churches fold their

arrns and flatter themselves that their duties are all fulfilled, whilo the mas->c« prefer tho saloon to the pulpit, and whilo rum rules in politics and sooiety ? Are the higher educational agencies doing all in their power to advance civilisation while they ignore this obstacle of progress, Can any political organisation bo said to represent the best aspiration and the •trongest need of the people, whilo the abiding source of misery and crime and poverty ia allowed to spread and flourish ?

There is needed something of that sacred fire which kindled into inextinguishable huat the zeal of the Aboli-

tiouists, and which compelled the abandonment of human slavery, to rouse the national indignation and abhorrence against this very much greater e»il. Nothing short of this, it is to be feared, will impel timeserving politicians to approach in a spirit of earnestnoss a subject which is distasteful to them mainly because they think they cannot afford to do so without

tho help and support of the class who derive from the degradation of tho foolish and ignorant the means whereby they continue to rule and plunder thoso whoso fagacity is proof against tlieir snares.