Temperance News.

Feilding Star, Volume IV, Issue 1169, 27 April 1910, Page 3

Temperance News.

PROHIBITION AND PROSPERITY

AN AUSTRALIAN VISITOR'S VIEWS.

> Mr J. B. Donkin, who has resided at Lachhm Falls, in the interior oi Now South "\Yales for the past thirty ■' years, has been on a motor tour through Sew Zealand, and he has i been greatly impressed by what he i saw in the South Island. ! Mr Donkin, who frankly confessed I that he ■ held ' brewery shares, told a Chris tchurch .reporter of what he had seen of the- beneficial effects of prohibtion in the no-licehso districts through which ho had passed. "I have been very much struck," he said, "by the exceedingly comfortable appearance and the prosperous air which marked the farm houses in the Ashburton district." Mr Donkin said that ho had seei an article in a reeenti issue of the Sydney Daily Telegraph, in which the correspondent had stated that he had been able to obtain drink in Ashburton by the glass or by the bottle; but, though he had himself tried his hardest to obtain drink in that district, for the sake of the experiment, he (Mr Donkin) had failed utterly, and an inspection of the charge-sheet of the Police Court showed only too clearly what prohibition had done for the district. It was drink, he added, that kept the labour market supplied with a largo proportion of casual labour, and licensed houses had a great deal to do with the downfall of the labouring man. Mr Donkin added that in Australia he had noticed that the spread of education and the higher trend of the moral tone of the people had re duced drinking to places where people were thickly congested, and that it was gradually but surely being sw-jpt , out of country districts." Shearers no longer "knocked down" their cheques, but in most instances were .sensible enough, to save their money. That fact had been borne in upon' him more than ever by hie visit to the no-license areas m New Zealand, which, he said had done a great deal towards the solution of the .problem of excessive liquor consumption. DRINK AND CRIME. •'•'l have kept during the past' twelve months a careful record of all the criminal cases brought before me," said Mr Justice Coleridge, at the Glamorgan Assizes, on March 8, "and fortyrour out of every 100 of these crimes wuold never hare been committed except for drink." THIS IS WHY YOU SHOULD SIGM THE PLEDGE. (By W. J. Bryan, who was a candidate tor the Presidency of U.S.A.) That the liquor traffic is the cause of unspeakable woe will not be questioned. How to deal with the subject lias interested the thoughtful the sympathetic, and the patriotic in all ages. Whatever difference of opinion may exist »-.; to the success of regulation irom without, no one can ciuestion the success of that method of regulation which locks the door from within. The strongest advocate of personal liberty must admit man's right to use that personal liberty to refuse to touch, taste or handle;" the most rabid opponent of regulations will confess that a man not only may but can, so regulate his own life as to reduce the demand for liquor to the extent of one man's consumption • no matter how bitterly opposed a man may be to prohibition in theory or in pract'ce. he cannot deny that "a man can absolutely prohibit "the use of liquor so far as he himself is concerned — Advit.