THE SOBRIETY OF CAMBRIDGE

Waikato Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 2649, 4 July 1889, Page 2

THE SOBRIETY OF CAMBRIDGE

TO THE UDITOIt. Sm,—Cambridgis people are naturally delighted with, the unmerited slur cast upon the township in the current number of Zeitgeist. The statement that there is " proportionately more open drunkeness in Cambridge than in Auckland," is one of those rash assertions made without any effort to ascertain the actual statistics of the mso, that bigoted writers are often betrayed into making. The statement itself is absolutely untrue; in the comparatively few instances of open drukounesshere the majority ot offenders are nonresidents in the town, and I assert that in the course of a few trips to Auckland, especially during the Christmas holidays or Oil occasions when a few men-of-war have been in port, I have seen more drunkeness— and not only that but rioting, fighting and debauchery, that we don't get here—than in a ten year's residence in Cambridge. Zeitgeist is, inferentially, anything but complimentary to the ministers of the. Gospel who have resided hero hitherto in his allusion to old residents being beyond shocking, and the now blood being determined to alter the state of things. They must have winked at all this teirible iniquity, and he alone is the Hercules who can cleanse the Augean stable. If it takes so much to shock the average Cambridge resident, how much in the way of mis-statements must it take to shock the intemperate bigots who applaud the utterances of Zeitgeist, whose fertile imagination and exuberant fancy burst through tho trammels that would confine them within the narrow limits of sober literal fact, until poor, plain, naked Truth, after one brief glance at her radiant rival gorgeously clothed in shoddy garments and wearing a beauteous garland of artificial flowers, hastens to hide her blushes in her classic retreat at the bottom of a well.—l am, &c., Tk Mojutk. Cambridge, July 3rd, 1889.