AMERICA AS A PRECEDENT

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 55, 14 September 1928, Page 8

AMERICA AS A PRECEDENT

(To the Editor.) Sir,—The secretary of the L.R.A. is still on the run, and declares we cannot 'catch" him. It's true that he is afraid of the "catch" once he embarks on discussing publicly just what.restoration of License has done for Ohinemuri. For years he denounced No-license and advocated Restoration. Now, faced with its deplorable consequences in Ohinemuri, he runs away, fails to find any error in my figures, fails to produce one single thing to show how .Restoration has operated. The secretary of the L.R.A. implies that I am trying to bluff your readers by "valueless" quotations. Well, the report from which I quoted is an official report entitled "Survey of Alcoholic Liquor Traffic and the Enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment—Report of Sub-com-mittee of the Committee on Alcoholic Liquor Traffic, House of Representatives, Sixty-eighth Congress." It was printed at the Government Printing Office, Washington, U.S.A., and issued in 1925. A copy is on my files. The quotations I gave are from page 13 of the report under the heading "Crime Reductions." That page also contains these statements: "In round numbers, a million lives have been saved by this decrease in the death rate, to which Prohibition was one of the principal determining factors." "Alcoholic insanity has decreased 66 per cent, in the first three Prohibition years compared with the last three wet years." "Prohibition has enabled charitable organisations to take 74 million dollars per year from funds formerly used to support cases of drink caused poverty and use this money in constructive welfare work." And yet the L.R.A. secretary says Prohibition reversed what he calls a "temperance trend," and produced more drunkenness. The secretary of the L.R.A! has declared that the greatest reduction in drunkenness in New Zealand took place before 6 o'clock closing, arid in line with that argues that .there was a distinct "temperance trend" in saloon days in the U.S.A. I now ask him to explain why it is that even the "wets" in the U.S.A. say the saloon must never come back. I ask him. why he is not now triumphantly, demonstrating how the return of the saloon (or open bar as we call it in New Zealand) has produced a "temperance trend" in Ohinemuri. Of course, if a 275 per cent, increase in drunkenness and a 390 per cent, increase in prohibition orders indicate a "temperance trend" Ohinemuri deserves the widest publicity, for its merit in puttng up this record under license restored. The L.R.A. secretary says I referred to Boston after eight years 'of Prohibition. I did not. I quoted from the above-mention-ed official report, which compared the figures of 1924 with those of 1917, and stated the reduction in arrests for drunkenness to be 44,000. Tho secretary of the L.R.A. states that in New Zealand the drunkenness figure is only 4.5 per thousand, and in arriving at this he doubtless benefits from the I negligible drunkenness in-the No-license | districts Which' offsets the heavier figure* in the License districts. In 17 No-licenst towns with a population of 56,000 convictions for drunkenness in 1927 totalled only 241, or 4.3 per thousand. In five License towns having only a population of 14,000 the total B'as 273, or 19.5 per thousand. Note that not only wag the proportion per thusand over four times as great, but the actual total amongst only 14,000 wm greater than the total amongst 56,000 in the No-license towns. _„,.. My claim of those on the Prohibition side is declared by the secretary of the L.R.A. to be "presumptuous and ridiculous." Well, I invite him to name any church, any social organisation, any educational authority, any medical association, any financial, building, or trading organisation in the U.S.A. that is asking for the return, of tho saloon. It is the New Zealand equivalent of the saloon that tlie L.R.A. wants to see continued._ Let him name anybody or any organisation worth listening to who is, in the. U.S.A., advocating the. return of the saloon.—l am, etc., J. MALTON MURRAY, Executive Secretary, New Zeal«wl Alliance. loth September. [We have given both sides ample space to express their opinions, and the discussion is now closed.—Ed.] A correspondent ("A Native of Sydney") writes to "The Post" complaining of the exhibition of posters, which he claims associate the airplane Southern Cross with advertising" in faYaur <£ Licensing Continuance.