FRANCES WILLARD’S WORDS.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3389, 2 December 1911, Page 8

FRANCES WILLARD’S WORDS.

A TRUE FRIEND OF HUMANITY.

IS DRINK THE ENEMY?

At the meeting of the Gisborne W.C.T.U. this week the warmest admiration and regard was expressed for the work of the late Miss Frances Willard, well known the world over as a temperance worker and a genuine reformer. In later years Miss Willard admitted that drink was but a minor evil, and largely caused by the economic condition and social environifient of a large mass of the people. That drink was not so much the cause of poverty as poverty was the cause of drink; that there are more people who drink because they are miserable than there are people miseiable because they drink. These are Miss Frances Willard’s own words (vide ’‘Liberator,” August, 1910): — The misery of millions of our people, the vast number of unemployed, call for reforms which, if they could be brought about, would vastly diminish the tendency to drink.

We may escape the toll levied by King Alcohol by refusing to patronise the saloon, but not so the tribute levied by King Landlord. Let our good army of temperance workers give but one year’s time to the destruction of land monopoly, and we wili pledge you that not only will involuntary poverty have disappeared, but that the curse of intemperance will from that moment begin to disappear. Your appeals will not then fall upon the dull comprehension of men who are but little removed from the brute creation, but will be made to men who are men, who, created in the image of God, have the attributes of God. Men do not submit to starvation wages from choice, nor do women go int-o sweatshops because they like it. These are the least of the evils from which they must choose if they live at all. It is not the saloon which makes it harder for the farmer to earn a living, with the aid of the reaper than it was for his father with the scythe. It is not alcohol that makes it harder for the seamstress to earn a living with a sewing machine than it was for her mother with the needle. It is not intemperance that makes it more difficult for the weaver with the power loom than it was for his father with the hand loom. Intemperance may cause the poverty of the drunkard and his family, but it does not account for the poverty of those who are in no way connected with the curse. To turn the victims from their ways would certainly benefit them, but it would under present conditions make the lot of sober men all the harder.

Is it any wonder that Labour'rejects with scorn the overtures of the shortsighted reformers who argue that the thousands of wage-earners who never touch alcohol are kept in poverty through drink. To the earnest reformer the idea of prohibition being the saviour of the workers is too stupid for serious consideration. If abstention from alcohol means all that the No-license advocates claim, why is it that the races which religiously avoid alcohol, like the Turks and the Hindoos, find themselves In much worse circumstances, economically and socially, than the nations which have descended from a hundred generations of drinking ancestors and have conquered the world.***