SAUNDERS v. WHISKY.

Akaroa Mail and Banks Peninsula Advertiser, Volume XVII, Issue 1307, 25 January 1889, Page 2

SAUNDERS v. WHISKY.

(Evening Post.)

The ©lection of Mr William Saunders as member for Lincoln ia a matter for regret. We cannot, perhaps, blame the electors tor perferring him to Mr John Ollivier, but they should not have been reduced to any such choice. Canterbury has plenty of better men than either, and it betokens a low condition of political vitality when we find the beet men abstaining from offering themselves, and apparently content to let the representation fall into the hands of men of the Verrall or Saunders calibre. Mr Saunders will do no good in the House for himself, or his constituents, or the colony. He belongs quite as distinctly as his late opponent; Mr Ollivier, to the politically played-out class. He may not, indeed, like that gentleman, have a personal grievance, which he desired to ventilate in Parliament, but he is a soured and disappointed man, who has had many chances of public usefulness in the past, but has missed them fell He will be a recruit to the skmHint party, and will probably outvie even Mt Goldie himself in cutting down salaries and experimenting to ascertain the very smallest sum upon which a Civil servant can possibly manage to maintain life. The Service will have a bad time of it with Mr Saunders, and he will be great when the Estimates are before the House. Eoonomist though he be, we venture, however, to predict that be will next session cost the country more in taking up time with the discussion of his absurd State ■■ distillery scheme than he will be instrumental in saving by any reduction in the Estimates. This State distillery is Mr Saunders' special *' fad " at the present moment, and Lincoln being an agricultural district, he no doubt owes his election to the visions which he haß conjured up among the farmers of vast crops of barley which the State will always be ready to buy for whisky, at a fixed and highly .remunerative price. It is a singular fact that while advocating a scheme of this kind, Mr Saunders is a pronounced abolitionist. He wants the Sta. eto assume the monopoly of the manufacture of whisky, for the manufacture of the agricultural interest, while for the benefit ©f the community generally he advocates the total prohibition of the drink traffic. We do not know precisely how he proposes to reconcile tbe two opinions, nor indeed is it worth enquiring. Ho is almost as great a teetotal zealot as Sir William Fox himself, and well nigh as intemperate in its. advocacy, but on this particular subject of a State distillery they differ veiy widely, and when they met not long ago on a platform to discuss the subject, the knight made mincemeat of the would-be-distiller's arguments, and utterly discomfited him. Of course, however, even Sir William Fox failed to carry conviction to what Mr Saunders terms his mind, and so he has persisted throughout the election in making the manufacture of whisky a plank of his platform. And the Lincoln fanners have been gulled accordingly, even as their neighbor, of Ashley were gulled not so long ago by Mi Verrall's scheme of getting cheap money by means of a State Bank. "Of the two schemes,,we prefer Mr Verrall's. There may be some solid good at the bottom of the latter, although Mr Verrall has not the wit to develop it, but the State distillery idea is simply preposterous, and could produce nothing but disaster were it tried. Indeed, the experiment of permitting distillation at all in the colony, aport altogether from tho state undertaking the work, has already been tried and failed. It was attempted with a view of helping the agricultural interest, and all the arguments now ÜBed by Mr Sounders to -how that it would_do so were trotted out then. but.they failed to stand the test of practical experience. The distillers made efforts certainly, but they exhibited a Strang* perversity in preferring sugar to barley as a material to make it from, no doubt because it was cheaper. The quantity of barley used was found to be very small indeed, and ultimately it was found that tho differential duty accorded as an encouragement to the new industry was causing such an enormous loss to tba revenue that Parliament was glad enough to pay heavy compensation to shut the distilleries up. We do not think Mr Saunders will induce the Legislature to repeat the experiment in any shape or with any variations.