FINANCE AND LIQUOR.

Evening Star, Issue 19381, 15 October 1926, Page 2

FINANCE AND LIQUOR.

TO TEE EDITOR. Sir, —It is difficult to understand what Mr Ralph Harrison is driving at in his quite unnecessary reply to and attack on my letter on the above. Seemingly Mr Harrison, recognising , that I in an indirect way referred to ' his words spoken at the Hospital Hoard, thinks' ho should com© forth and defend himself. Mr Harrison says . i that if “Liberty” can find consolation > in the idea that the brewers are the cause of 8 unemployment he cannot. This sentence of your correspondent’s is pure piffle. First, would I, of all persons, bo able to find “consolation” ■ in such an idea? Second, 1 never said anything of the sort. What I did state was that there is something like £10,000,000 per year spent on drink i»

New Zealand, and that if this money was spent on oilier things it could not help but employ more labor and return more in wages than it docs through drink channels. That is a prop -fftion which neither Mr Harrison r,;r any other defender of the liquor traffic can dispute. Mr Harrison is sceptical regaining tho effects of the 1 liquor traffic on unemployment. The Royal Commission on tho Poor Law (England) said; “A S’ weight of evidence indicates as the most potent and universal factor in causing pauperism.” Mr Philip Snowden, that well-known Labor loader, said: “I believe that the drink traffic is one of the greatest evils which curses our land to-day. Every week that I live I am more convinced that the political power of the liquor traffic and the drinking habits of the people are one of_ tho greatest—if not the greatest—hindrances in the way ol everything that makes for national righteousness and tho betterment of the conditions of tho people.” I leave Mr Harrison to digest these two items at his leisure. If, however, his pugnacious nature craves further argument, will he first show my statement to be incorrect? My records show that the liquor traffic comes a very long way behind as an employer of labor and in its return of wages _ as compared with any other trade. Can Mr Harrison do otherwise?—l am, etc., Libertv. October 14.