THE LIQUOR PROBLEM.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3392, 6 December 1911, Page 2

THE LIQUOR PROBLEM.

WHAT A LEADINC AMERICAN JOURNAL SAYS.

(Published by arrangement with Mr. \V. D. Lvsnar.) That well-known American publication, “Harper’s Weekly,” says: “It does not seem to us that there is any prospect that the use of alcoholic beverages will ever cease in the United States. We do not believe in compulsory, total abstinence for all the people. It is not practicable, and we doubt il it would be beneficial. This opinion is not based on esteem for alcoholic beverages or on the idea that they do people good. It is based merely on observation of the habits of mankind and on some reading. You cannot run a country on the linos of an inebriate asylum nor treat its population like patients who must lie kept from drink at any cost, and whether they like it or not. An effort was made to do something like that in tho army when the canteen was abolished. It has been a great failure, and has helped very much to give our army the worst hospital record of any army in the civilised world. The most that can he done about drink, as we see the case, is to minimise its temptations, regulate and restrict its manufacture and sale, keep it away from the young, disseminate sound instruction as to its effects, favor the mild beverages rather than the stronger ones, and work out a more intelligent treatment of drunkenness and drunkards.” SOME OTHER OPINIONS.

The following are a few weighty opinions on the subject which are well worth noting: “I desire to recommend once more, in the interests of the moral welfare and discipline of the troops, the removal, if practicable, of the legislative prohibition against the sale of beer and light wines, which prohibition results in luring the soldier away from his barrack to neighboring dives, where his body and soul are poisoned and ruined by the liquors, with the accompanying vice of harlotry, and where his money is taken from him by gamblers and thieves. Unauthorised absences and frequent desertions directly traceable to visits to these dens of iniquity form a large percentage of the cases ot trial by the several military courts, the numbers of which are a blot on the otherwise fair record of our army.”—-Lieut.rGeneral Henry C. Corbine, of the United States Army, in his annual report, .1906. Major-General Leonard Wood, U.S. Army, commanding the Department of the East, in his last annual report to Congress, 1910. said, tersely: “It is believed that the re-establishment of the canteen would be in the best interest of the army.” “To say that certain evils come from a certain source suggests only to fools the hasty annihilation of the source before studying whether greater evils might not result from its destruction and without asking whether tho evils might not be reduced and the good from ■the same source remain untouched and untampered with.”—Professor Munsterberg. Justin McCarthy, M.P. : “The prohibition law in Canada, and the United States- is a gross and ludicrous imposture.”

Judge Haliburton: “Laws which attempt to abolish the use of liquor altogether, defeat themselves. Tt is impossible to carry them into operation.”***