COUNTING THE COST.

Hawera Star, Volume XLV, 16 October 1925, Page 6

COUNTING THE COST.

A LAWLESS BUSINESS

CORRUPTION RAMP AN'!. (By Henry Bourne Joy, Director Packard Oar Co., and formerly Director Federal Reserve Bank at Chicago). “The almost countless millions of dollars which have been appropriated and spent in five yeans to accomplish, the enforcement of bone dry Prohibition have failed in that accomplishment. Not only lias this country failed, as naturally must be the case, to make itself bone dry at the vast cost of the 'appropriations for the dry armies and dry navies, but also it nas been' foregoing during that period a revenue which it might readily have in its national treasury of approximately five hundred millions of dollars per annum, excise tax, and an amount of money approximating that ..sum has been going to the purveyors of alcoholic beverages, whom some people call boot-leggers and others call merchant princes. “Our courts are consigning to jail, to associate . wiifo thugs, imirdererw, burglars and every sort of villain, a large number of decent young men who have taken a chance of making easy money by purveying liquor across the borders: Men have always taken such risks for easy money. Men always will take such risks for easy money. They are not cheating our customs nor defrauding the Government of revenue, because there is no duty the goods ‘ imported. They take the risk for the easy money. Again human nature prevails. “It is perfectly safe to state to-day that this country cannot .survive with half of its people trying to put the other half of its population in the penitentiaries of our" country for following the natural dictates ‘of human instincts.” —The North American Review, 1925.

A( law which makes criminals of people who are not fyiminals. and which would transform this country into a kind of penal settlement is not a fit law for New Zealand. (Published by arrangement .)^