POVERTY AND PROHIBITION.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXXIII, Issue 16035, 16 September 1912, Page 8

POVERTY AND PROHIBITION.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir, —In his reply to. my letter Mr Nichols says that I misunderstand tho draft of his argument and that my criticism of his alleged cause of poverty is therefore inyalid. Since he has stated his case quite plainly in his letter I trust there will bo no need, for him to demur in future to fair criticism on this ground. As I have .gone the whole hog with him regarding national prohibition and the bare majority, there is no need for him to try and convert me to the justice of these principles. The point at issue between us is this: "Is drink the cause or the effect of poverty?" I hold the latter view, because I have seen what Mr Nichols cannot see, the misery of the abnormal social life of both rich and poor. To escape the misery of their environment, the overworked worker, the idle rich man and his brother, the pauper, try to . drown their misery in the flowing bowl. Mr Nichols can see the man with the rtfgged coat who is a wall flower for a public-house, but he cannot, see his privileged brothers, the landlords, and the lehdlords, who travel in motor-cars with a case of champagne in the tonneau. The Socialist realises that the idle rich are the complement of the idle poor and that modern landlordism and misery are anti-social and anti-Christian institutions. Where I part company with the Socialists is when we come to consider the practicability of their ulterior scheme Mr Nichols says that if all tho money wasted on drink was 6penfc on necessaries the workers would 6oon co-operatively own all their industries. I fear that "is the fevered dream of the Syndicalist in another form. The income of the wage-earner is not so munificent as Mr Nichols's optimism imagines. A married man with a wife and three children to support gets ;28s per week in dry weather. How all the shares in the Bank of New Zealand are to be purchased with this large capital, to say nothing of all the other concerns, is beyond my ken. A few years ago we heard Mr Bedford develop this argument, and ' our minds marvelled at the appalling economic ignorance of an instructor in practical economics to the Otago University as he instanced the number of things that could be bought with the money spent on drink; and yet one moment's though will convince the meanest mind that the effect of prohibition must be to inflate land values and to increase rents and cost of living due to the maladjustment of an economic law. We need not mention the danger of reaction arising, which is certain, unless Mr Nichols also accepts the single tax and does not keep his eggs all in one basket.—l am, etc., F. W. BURKE.