Giving Away Liquor.

Hastings Standard, Issue 110, 2 September 1896, Page 4

Giving Away Liquor.

A number of Sunday trading cases having been dismissed in Canterbury owing to the transactions not having been considered by the Magistrate to have been sales—merely gifts by the publicans, the Lyttelton Times says -There must really be something done to curb the generosity of those hot<?l keepers who persist in giving away liquor on Sundays. So far as we are aware, no other tradesmen are subject to such fits of lavish benevolence, though they, as much as publicans, are forbidden to traffic on the day of rest. If it pays a publican to dispense his wares gratis on one day of the week for the sake of keeping his customers about him, one would think that the habit would be as remunerative in the case of other dealers ; but as the latter resolutely refuse to do business on these lines, there must be something peculiar in the liquor-selling trade that causes the pratice. Can it be possible that a new form of insanity has been developed, a sort of hospitality-mania, resulting from the habit of playing the generous " host" for six days in every week, so that at the risk of blank ruin and bankruptcy, the victims of the craze cannot refrain from dispensing hospitality gratis on the one day that they are not allowed to charge for it? This hypothesis seems reasonable, and if we have here the explanation of the free dispensing of liquors on Sundays, it is clearly the duty of society to save these poor demented creatures from the consequences of their craze.