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Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 5715, 23 December 1889, Page 2

What is sadly needed iv New Zealand is some sort of agricultural asylum for ablebodied paupers, who havo rendered themselves out-casts by vice and intemperance. In all tho larger towns in tho colony thero may be found men whom no one will employ because they uro habitual drunkards, and these unfortunate.*", many of them well educated, and formerly in good positions, have degenorated into helpless slaves of alcohol. How they live is a mystery. They sleep where they can, and they occasionally obtain food from the charitable. They have rendered themselves incapable of work, and they are to be seen, day after day, haunting the streets, sometimes begging, more often starving not so much for food as for drink. What their end will be it is not difficult to predict. But except tht»y do something that will bring them before the Court as vagrants for them six months' gaol, there is no public institution to which they can be sent, and, by proper treatment, lifted out from tho slough into which thoy havo fallen. Napior is not without melancholy examples of the class to which we ha\-e alluded. It seems a shame to. let them go on as they are doing.. It is no use to send them out of the place to get rid of the eye-sere, because they could only, live elsewhere as they have lived here. There should be some sort of an asylum to which they could be committed. '