Temperance News.

Feilding Star, Volume V, Issue 1404, 31 January 1911, Page 4

Temperance News.

WHY TEMPERANCE REFORM SHOULD COME FIRST.

CARDINAL MANNING'S REASONS

There are many people, well read, clean-living, intelligent, and in every way worthy citizens,: who fail to see eye to eye with No-license advocates when they claim that the drink evil is to-day the most clamant of all evils for settlement; when they claim that the commanding position in public interest that the No-license cause holds at present belongs to it by right, because it is the most important single subject before the people. Of couree, the fact that it has gained jthis commanding position is of itself proof of the fact that ite importance deserves it, because no agitation about an insufficiently important cause could maintain interest in itself as the Nolicense cause has done for so many years. If the correctness of the above reasoning be questioned, however, the following list of reasons by Cardinal Manning, all of which apply to New Zealand just as well as to Great Britain, should convince the most sceptical :—

The manifold and great evils of our national vice were thus clearly and graphically stated by Cardinal Manning in the Fortnightly Review in 1886: Our nation has a multitude of vices. Is there any vice- that cannot be charged against us? But is there one vice that is head and shoulders above all others? Is there one that by its stature and its sway dominates over all around it? To answer this let us ask—

(1) Is there any vice in the United Kingdom that slays at least 60,000, or, as others believe and affirm, 120,----000, every year? - (2) Or that lays seeds of a whole harvest of disease of the most fatal kind, and renders all other lighter diseases more acute, and perhaps even fatal in the end?

(3) Or that causes at least onethird of all the madness confined in our asylums? (4) Or that prompts, directly or indirectly, 75 per cent, of all crime? (5) Or that produces an unseen and secret world of all kinds of moral evil and of personal degradation which no police court ever knows, and no human eye can eve reach? (6) Or that, in the midst of our immense and multiplying wealth, produced, not poverty, which is honourable, but pauperism, which is a disgrace to a civilised people? (7) Or that ruins men of every class and condition of life, from the highest to the lowest; men of _ every degree of culture and of education, of every honourable profession, public officials, naval and military officers and men, railway and household servants; and, what is worse than all, that ruins women of every class, from the most rude to the most refined?

(8) Or that, above all other evils, is the most potent cause, of destruction to the domestic life of all classes? (9) Or that has already wrecked, and is continually wrecking, the homes of our agricultural and factory workmen? (10) Or that has already Aeen found to paralyse the productiveness of our industries in comparison with otb.6" countries, especially the United States?

(11) Or, as we are officially informed, renders our commercial seamen less trustworthy on board ship ? (12) Or that spread these accumulating evils throughout the British Empire,' and is blighting our fairest colonies?

(13) Or that has destroyed, and is destroying, the indigenous racas wheresoever the British Empire is i"i contact with them, so that from the hem of its garments goes out, , not the virtue of civilisation-and of Christianity, but of degradation and of death ? New Zealand- now has the opportunity, while, as a nation, she is yet young to correct the initial mistake made in allowing the sale of alcoholic drinks. Shall we not endeavour to avoid what has brought such a heritage of woe to the ofder nations and will do the same to us?—Advt.