The Evening Star. WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Evening News, and Echo. THURSDAY, APRIL 14, 1092.

Auckland Star, Volume XXIII, Issue 89, 14 April 1892, Page 4

The Evening Star. WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Evening News, and Echo.

THURSDAY, APRIL 14, 1092.

For the cr.ußO that Ir.cis assistance, For tho wrens that noeds resistance, For the future in the distance, Ana the good tlmt we can de.

The publication of the national drink bill in the London " Times " possesses several points of interest to persons who give attention to the liquor trafficThe return has been furnished by Dr. Dawson Burns on behalf of the United Kingdom Alliance, and we may there" fore assume it is approximately accurate. We direct attention to it because figures, like facts, are stubborn things. An annual survey of the national expenditure on drink, based on authorised returns, sheds far more light than any amount of declamatory oratory upon the progress of abstinence principles in the United Kingdom. We regret to say that, notwithstanding the confident assertions of Sir Wilfrid Lawson and his friends, the figures supplied seem to prove unmistakably that progress of temperance reform in tha mother country is by no means satisfactory.

It appears that the total amount spent on intoxicating drinks in the United Kingdom during 1891 amounted to no less a sum than one hundred and forty-ene millions and a quarter sterling. It is difficult at first to grasp what is represented by this grand total. When we say that it means an expenditure of £3 15s per head, reckoning women and children as well as men, or £18 15s for a family of five persons, it is easier to realise how the drink bill hangs like a millstone round the neck of the English people.

It is often said that there is a vast change in the drinking habits of Englishmen. To some extent this is true. The upper classes display much less of the spirit of roystering revelry than did their ancestors of a generation ago, and the amount expended by the aristocracy on rare and costly wines has, undoubtedly, a tendency to diminish. In many English families, where formerly expensive vintages of champagne and Burgundy were indulged in, tea, coffee and other teetotal drinks ate now substituted. In the return furnished by Dr. Dawson Barns, we find that there is an increase for the year amounting to a million and three-quarters. The increase has been in home-made spirits and beer, while the decline has been in foreign and colonial spirits. The inference to be drawn from this is that as the increase is in the cheaper drinks, there has been an increase of drinking among the working classes during the year. This is a very important point; the batteries of temperance societies have been chiefly brought to play upon the poor classes, and it is discouraging, therefore, to find that these very persons are swelling the drink bill of the kingdom.

In comparing statistics of consumption, it is curious to notice that England takes the lead. This is accounted for by the fact of the prodigious consumption of beer by English working people. The amount put down to England under this heading is no less than millions of barrels, representing the enormous sum of This brings English expenditure for drink to no less a sum fcuan 7s 6d per family of five, while Scotland manages to get drunk at £16 5s per family, and Irish homes of the like dimensions contrive to take their fill of the." crathur " for a cost of ;£to ,1 is Bd. Scotland maintains a proud''pre-eminence in whisky, and her average sons, it appears, drink three bottles of whisky, to the average Irishman's two and the average Englishman's one.

The " Times," although seldom disposed to bear hard on the liquor traffic, is apparently aghast at the array of figures it has cited. "It means," continues the " Thunderer," " that down the national throat there flows enough to provide the country with two navies and two armies, with a Civil Service thrown in, or very nearly so. It means that the beer drunk in one year would pay the interest on the National Debt j'or three, or that, if funded for nine years, it would pay the whole debt, and leave us with no more interest or annuities to pay."

These considerations, show that notwithstanding what has been done by the temperance party, the liquor traffic,

with all its baleful effects, continues in almost undimioished force. Iα the colonies things are slightly better, but this is due chiefly to the non-drinking propensities of colonial-born youth. Even in the colonies we have abundant reason to conclude that the decrease in the drinking habits of the people is due, not altogether to moral causes, but to the depressed state of the times. As soon as ever there is anything like a return of prosperity the anriual drink bill swells in proportion; thus, in Victoria, which has an unenviable preeminence in this respect, as the result of a late fictitious prosperity, the expenditure on drink is set down at a little over £6 per head, including babies, women, and teetotallers. In our own colony, although the amount per head is considerably less, the tendency seems to be an increase in the consumption of beer and a decline, in that of spirits.

Every earnest - minded teetotaller must confess that the present aspect of the drink question is decidedly unsatisfactory. It cannot be said that we sin in ignorance, for the facts of the case are constantly being rehearsed before the public. Indulgence in drink is already producing grave evils which threaten to become intensified as time goes on. The poverty that is being voiced by thousands of unemployed in Melbourne and Sydney can be largely traced to this source. The number of old people thrown upon the State for maintenance would be very much lessened if drinking habits were diminished. Referring to Mr Chamberlain's scheme of national insurance, by which everyone over sixty-five years of age is to receive a small annuity, the total cost of which is contemplated at a contemporary writes : "To irrigate the national palate with fiery or stupifying liquids, there is spent every year a sum ten times as great as would suffice to lift the shadow of poverty from every home in the United Kingdom."

The whole world seeks a solution of the problem. Reformers, from the Emperor of Germany to Gospel temperance secretaries, are recommending measures more or less drastic. S.ome of the Australian journals have been seriously urging the adoption of what is known as the Norwegian system. They regard the present measures as futile as to attempt to exhaust Niagara with a squirt. It would not be amiss if our temperance committees looked the thing squarely in the face, and seriously took into consideration whether some such system of State regulation as prevails in Norway, whereby private profit in drink is excluded, might not be applied with advantage in regulating the drink traffic of this colony.