THE LIQUOR PROBLEM.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3392, 7 December 1911, Page 2

THE LIQUOR PROBLEM.

WHAT A LEADING AMERICAN JOURNAL. SAYS.

(Published by arrangement with Mi

W. D. Lysnar.) 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 baited States. We do not believe in compulsory total abstinence for all the people- l.t is not practicable, and we doubt if it would i:e 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 tho lines of an inebriate asylum nor treat its population like patients who must be kept from drink at any cost, and whether they like it or not. An effort was .made to do something like that

the army when the canteen was >.dished. it lias been a great failure,

am! has helped very much to give our army the worst hospital record of any army in the civilised world. The most i bat can be done about drink, as wo 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 mill 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 tlie 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 iii'm by gamblers and thieves. Unauthmused .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.-General Henry C. Corbino, of the United States Army, in his annual report, 1906. Major-General Leonard Wood, U.S. Army, commanding the Department of the East, in bis 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 tho army.” “To say that certain evils come from a certain source suggests only to fools the hasty annihilation of the source liefore studying whether . greater evils might not result from its destruction and without asking whether the. 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 tbo United States is a gross and ludicrous imposture.”

Judge Halliburton : “Laws. which attempt to abolish the use of liquor altogether, defeat themselves. It is impossible to carry them into operation/’*** Let moderate-minded people, benefit by the knowledge and experience of others.