WHAT IS WRONG WITH NEW ZEALAND?

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLVIII, Issue 292, 7 November 1928, Page 7

WHAT IS WRONG WITH NEW ZEALAND?

[Published by Arrangement.]

Is New Zealand a drunken country? Statistics show that in comparison with) any other country it is a very sober onei, and by far the soberest of all countries in which substantial restrictions are placed on the sale of liquor. Statistics often bother the plain man, who has his own eyes and ears, anyway. And the plain man in his Dominion, using his eyes, learns that a drunken man is an oddity and a rarity. His ears tell him that no person of any consequence or capacity lias ever come to New. Zealand and left it without sSying that it is a remarkably clean and sober and healthy land. They tell us, perhaps, that we are a little off the line in our higher education, that we are not treating our pastures right, that we have not balanced our industrial activities. But not one of them has said that there is any sign that we are abusing the good gift of fermented liquor. They would all stare if anyone said to them that the state of the people is such that the country is in need of a national prohibition order. Even the professional prohibition orators imported from time to time by the N.Z. Alliance have shrunk from saying what tho prohibition movement implies. They stick to generalities, or rather, to one generality : that the forcible extinction of the sober man’s right to drink beer or wine or whisky will make our country a heaven on earth —such a heaven as the earth has never experienced. Foreign investigators, and Americans themselves, have been thinking about the conditions that the heaven-bringing doctrine of the prohibitionists have brought to the United States, and the general conclusion is that “if this is heaven, heaven is not what we thought it was.” In comparison with Britain, New Zealand simply has no “drink problem,” and yet in Britain the drink evil is not of any prime importance, and has not dulled the energy or spirit of the great Island Kingdom. And Britain will never listen to the proposers of prohibition any more than New Zealand will. 5