LOCAL OPTION.

Clutha Leader, Volume XX, Issue 1035, 25 May 1894, Page 7

LOCAL OPTION.

THE HOME OPINIONS. The London correspondent of a Contemporary writing on the above subject says :— - If New Zealand has* not of late occupied any prominent share of the outside world's attention in other respects, its recent advances in tlio direction of social legislation are being critically watched by political reformers on this side. The woman's franchise was the subject .of many articles in the London journals and magazines, some pessimistic, some optimistic, and a row dubious and cautious. Its natural corollary, the attitude of the mothers and daughters in the recent local option fight, is also watched in that slow Conservative spirit which makes Englishmen so proverbially suspicious of radical innovations. The narrowness of the majority by which total prohibition was averted in Duneciin an-i Port Chalmers, where the Scotch element and their favourite beverage used to be all-prevad-ing and powerful, the victories scored by the prohibitionists in Oamaru and the Clutha, and the large reduction of the number of existing licenses in Christchurch, has come upon those who have eagerly watched the progress of events from this side as somewhat in the nature of a surprise, and I can readily imagine must have opened the eyes of the liquor interest in the colony, having regard to the strenuous exertions made last session to increase the required majority on the side of total prohibition, while making a bare majority sufficient for the continuance of the existing licenses for a period of three years. The Echo thinks the adoption of total prohibition in Dimedin is l a hopeless effort to lealise an impracticable ideal/ and" that though the wives and daughters of New Zealand may vote solid for the abolition of all public-houses in the innocent belief that drunken husbands and fathers will no longer look upon the wine when it is red, experience has shown in similar cases ' that men can still get as much liquor as they want from the friendly chemist or accommodating grocer.' But the writer of the above seems to lose sight of the fact that the law in its existing form can be made even more stringent against sly-grog sellers than against the publican. Truth thinks ' the result of the polling may be regarded in the light of coming events casting their shadows before as ' an earnest of what is likely to happen in this country when a similar question comes before the British public for decision.' The fact that New Zealand is a pioneer in the march of social legislation, and that the experiment she is making in this direction wili form a criterion for the Mother Country, must be intensely flattering to men like Mr Jago and the reverend editor of the Prohibitionist.