A CHANGED OUTLOOK

Auckland Star, Volume LXXVI, Issue 100, 30 April 1945, Page 4

A CHANGED OUTLOOK

There are fashions in vices as in clothes. Over a hundred years ago it was no disgrace to be a sot. There was an eticmette in drinking. The worst kind of social failure was to incur the reproach that you could not get drunk like a gentleman. The literature of that period reeked of alcohol. Heroes of romance got drunk as a matter of course. Mr. Pickwick, an elderly merchant of credit and renown, was an amusing spectacle. To go to bed with your boots on was to proclaim yourself a man of spirit; to take hock and seltzer before breakfast was to prove yourself a man of the world. It is true that we have still a few literary enthusiasts among us to write in praise of beer and wine, but not one to lift up his voice to the glory of sheer drunkenness as the fin-de-siecle authors of the 18th century did. We have no modern drinking songs in any way comparable with the songs that Burns write for the Crochalian Fencibles. In the hands of John Masefield the theme of "Tarn o' Shanter , becomes "The Everlasting Mercy." Drink is no longer a laughing "matter; it has become a problem. Thus it is that we are mere and more eager to pass laws which shall put an end to drunkenness. Thus it is that law-abiding citizens grow more and more sober every year, and ever more and more inclined to regard drunkenness as an unmitigated evil. ROBERT H. NELL.