HOW LOCAL OPTION WORKS IN CANADA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXIV, Issue 7920, 12 April 1887, Page 3

HOW LOCAL OPTION WORKS IN CANADA.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir,— In your supplement of Saturday last you have reprinted an article on the above subject, written by " the well-known author, Mr. Grant Allen,''' in which he denounces the Canadian Local Option Act as " a wicked and oppressive law," and endeavours to prove by his own personal observation, "and the opinion of every unprejudiced observer, that the Act is a total failure." lam so badly posted up as not to know in what department of, literature Mr. Allen has attained distinction, bat am inclined to think that it must have been as a writer of fiction. It is very evident that ha came to the consideration of the subject with the strongest possible prejudices, and that the practioe of total abstinence was one with which he was personally not familiar, and with which he had no sympathy; for he toils us what a dreadfnl thing it was to ride a few miles in a railway carriage and not to be able to get a glass of beer, the result being that he went to bed at Montreal with a bad headache. Mr. Allen s moral fitness to form opinions on a great moral and social question may be estimated by a single sentence—"l do not believe," he says, "in the right of 'any majority, however large or united, to deprive any minority, however small or wicked, of the divine and natural claim to eat and drink, buy and sell, exactly what it chooses itself, without let or hindrance. We broke the law daily with great cheerfulness. Breaking any law is always a pleasure to a wellconstituted mind ; when the law itself is a bad one the pleasure becomes a duty as well." A man who holds such opinions as these will probably not have any very great admiration for the moral law of speaking the truth, and will possibly not hesitate to pervert facts, or even invent them, to enable him "to make the worse appear the better reason." For instance, he tells us that on Canadian railways most travellers carry with them a small flask of that pestilential drink known as whisky, a wineg Useful of which is quite enough to give a sober man cause for repentance next morning. Mark the bold assertion, " most travellers." I travelled a year and a half ago all through the length and breadth of Canada, generally in crowded cars, full of men and women of all classes, with my eyes open to any peculiarities of the liquor traffic that might ooour, and, so far as I can remember, I never once saw a flask produced or used by any man or woman ; and I never saw a single man or woman the worse for drink in any car or elsewhere connected with the railway. However, I am not going to put my personal experiences in opposition to those of the " Well-known Author." I wish rather to give proof that his aßßertion that the opinion is everywhere expressed by unprejudiced observers that the Scott Act is a total failure, is the reverse of truth. I have by me a current file of a Canadian weekly paper, which contains pages of testimony to the effect that this Act has been no failure; but it would fill pages of your journal to reproduce them. I will briefly refer you to a paper on the subject by th 6 Rev. D. V. Lucas, of Montreal, a native of Canada, and Wesleyan minister, which was read by him at the British and Colonial Temperance Conference, held in London last year, where he appeared as a delegate. The following is a very brief summary of the principal points. How the Canadians got the Scott Act was thus : Having heard much of the prohibitory law of the neighbouring State of Maine,which had been in force some 20 years, the Canadian Parliament sent a Commission, composed of one abstainer and one non-abstainer, to see how far it had been a success. Aftar an exhaustive inquiry in Maine, this Commission reported that the Maine law had been an eminent success, and recommended the introduction of it into Canada. Shortly after the federation of Canada the Parliament of the Dominion passed this Scott Act, which was not absolutely prohibitory like that of Maine, but a Local Option Act, giving to a bare majority of the inhabitants of each licensing district the power of dec! dine; at the ballot box whether licenses to sell intoxicating drink should be granted or not within such dißtriot. " Since then," says Mr. Lucas, "the law has had a wonderful record of successes. It has passed through 91 contests, and been carried In 71 out of the 91, and is now In force in 65 counties and cities of the Dominion. Now this was done gradually and over a period of five or six years. If the Aot was, as Mr. Allen asserts, a total failure, is it likely that one county and city after another would go on introducing it with the evidence of the failure before their eyes ? But let us look at the authentic figures furnished by that certainly unprejudiced official, the Minister of Justice, in his official capacity. The (Jounty of Halton, in one of the most populous parts of Canada, is adjoined on one side by the County of Wentworth, which rejected the' Act, and on the other side by (be County of Wellington, whioh was in a state of transition, having adopted the Act, but not fully got it into operation. Now, such being the state of things, what was the state of crime' in each ? The following tables show : — CRIMES or ALL SORTS. Wdjjtworth : 1196, or one in every 42 inhabitants. Wellington : 673, or one in every 131 inhabitants. Halton : 39, or one in every 664 inhabitants. In the three years which the Act had been in force in Halton crime had been reduced 60 per cent! dbbnk and disorderly, Wentworth: 666, or one in every 98. Wellington: 285, or one in overy 327. Halton: 3, or one in every 7334. In another county, Renfrew, after the law had been only six months in force, the total crimes were reduocd to less than onehalf, assault and battery to less than onethird, and the drunk and disorderly to less than one-fifth. " The above report," says Mr. Lucas, "is backed by the testimony of many prominent men, including merchants, ministers, postmasters, editors, Crown Land agents, County Registrar, and others. The statements. are also confirmed by letters from Roman Catholic priests in the county, who say that the Scott Act in their section hai» been an unqualified success, and that it has done, and is doing, great good in preventing drunkenness, and in dispersing the parasites of the bar-room. We have also whole volumes of testimony from all parts of the Dominion respecting the good effects following the adoption of the local option measure." 1 think, sir, that the above may be very fairly set off against tie assertions of the " Well-known Author," who gets a headache if obliged to go without his beer for an hour or two, and who thinks it is a pleasure to every well-regulated mmd to break any law, and a duty to break any one which he thinks a bad one.l am, & Cit William Fox. [We are sorry to learn that Sir William Fox is so ill-informed on contemporary literature as to know nothing of Mr. Grant Allen. Sir William must read neither the English nor the colonial newspapers or magazines, or, at all events, must confine himself to discussions about liquor laws. We may inform him that Mr. Allen was born in Canada, and educated in Oxford, As to the works he has written, a list of the principal will, be found in "Men of the Time."