PROHIBITION IN AMERICA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXVI, Issue 9451, 23 August 1889, Page 6

PROHIBITION IN AMERICA.

TO Til E EDITOR. Sib,ln your paper of this morning you have inserted without comment an article under the above beading taken from the Philadelphia Press, which is calculated to mislead your readers. That the prohibition party have lately met with discouraging defeats in some of the States and Canada is quite true, but prohibition is not defeated, and has not been "repealed." In none of their recent " defeats" has a single prohibitory law been repealed. The liquor traffickers would be very glad if it were so, and are very desirions of making it appear to be so. But the facts do not bear this out. A few words of explanation, however, are necessary to enable your readers to detect their misrepresentations. In Great Britain we have no written Constitution. A few Constitutional principles have been put in writing, such as Magna Charta, or the Bill of Rights, but beyond that no man can physically lay his finger on the British Constitution. In America it is quite different. The United States as a whole, and each State separately, has a written Constitution, exactly defining the limits of the rights and powers of tie people, and the political machinery by which they are to be enforced. They were irrevocably fixed at the date of the Declaration of Independence, or subsequently, aa new States were created. Their legislatures can make no changes in these Constitutions. That can only be done by a twothirds majority, (in most cases) of a plebiscite vote of all the electors of the Union, or of each State as may be, and any change so made can only be repealed in the same manner by a plebiscite vote. So a provision inserted in a Constitution has a vastly greater permanence than one enacted by the legislature, which may be at any time repealed by the bare majority of the body which enacted it. Now many of the States have passed prohibitory laws, which it wad quite in their power to do. But their legislators could at any time repeal those laws. In order to prevent socri a contingency several of the prohibition States have endeavoured to amend their Constitution by inserting their prohibitory laws into it. Maine was the first to do so, four or five years ago, by an enormous plebiscite majority. Encouraged by this several other States which had prohibitory laws in force attempted by the same means to give them similar permanence, but several of them have failed in the attempt. But this has not resulted in any " repeal" of their prohibitory laws. These continue in force just as before. All that has been said by the winning majority has been, *' Keep your law on your Statute Book, and not in your Constitution." That was the sole issue at the late elections. Massachusetts, for instance, one of the States in which the boasted " repeal" has occurred, has at this moment 275 cities and counties under rigorous prohibition by local option, and only 75 towns under license. Yet the Philadelphia editor tells us that " Massachusetts had prohibition for 15 years, and finally repealed it, and that an effort to restore prohibition was voted down by an overwhelming majority." Not a word of truth in. this. What was voted down was merely the attempt to put the law into the constitution. It still remains on the statute book, and all those cities and counties continue " dry." The Pennsylvania case is precisely similar. Prohibition was and is, in force, in a large number of its counties and towns, but there the Temperance party tried to put it into their constitution. They failed, but the law still exists in the statute book, and, in fact, in the prohibitory towns and counties. In Canada also we are told that certain cities and counties " repealed " prohibition. They did nothing of the sort. They withdrew from it for three years, but the Act continues in force, and at next elections they can reimpose prohibition. The Scott Act, which gave Canada local option, has not been repealed. An attempt to repeal it in the Dominion Legislature was defeated by an enormous majority, and is in force in every part of Canada at this hour, though several counties and cities do not avail themselves of she power it gives. The value of statements made in respect of Kansas and lowa may be tested by the utterances of the Governors, AttorneyGenerals, and other officials of those States, read at the late meeting of the Gospel Temperance Association in this city by the Rev. Mr. Chew, for 20 years a minister in Topeka, the capital of Kansas, and his own experience. They utterly and altogether contradict the assertion of the anonymous writer in the Philadelphia Press. The value of the unsupported assertions of the latter may bo estimated by the following extract from another American journal commenting on the Philadelphia papers. The writer states that the latter have not shrunk even from forgery in their attempts to poison the public mind on this question.

Never has there been in the history of this country a more shameless prostitution of the press in the interests of iniquity. The political newspapers, the most powerful agency of party machinery, were sold out, bodv and soul. Do you doubt it? Hear what Chairman Palmer says, himaelf a leading Republican : " The liquor men have had a prodigious fund, and have spent not less than 1(X),000 dollars upon the newspapers of the State. The leading journals have been so debauched, that in touching upon the essential points of the prohibition controversy they have hardly told a ward of truth from the beginning to the end The newspapers of the State, with a few exceptions have been nothing but common prostitutes. ... I do not complain because they have opposed prohibition, but because they have permitted the saloons to use their columns for the most shameless purposes— for systematically deceiving the people. They have printed bogus despatches, and unhesitatingly used what they knew was bogus matter. . . . They have printed articles manufactured right here in Philadelphia, under the disguise of honest despatches from Des Moines, Topeka, Atchison, and other places in prohibition States, giving what pretended to be facts and figures. . . . We nave sent to these prohibition cities, and obtained from the highest authorities the most conclusive denials of the statements made in the bogus ' despatches.' Thesedenials we have carried to the papers that printed the false assertions, hoping that motives of decency and fairness would .persuade the editors to make corrections. But their terms for corrections were 50 cents a line, with the condition that each correction should appear with an advertising mark. We took some of these denials to the Philadelphia Ledger, George W. Child's paper, and the best that the organ of that philanthropist would do for us Wets to print them in the advertising columns, under the head of ' Political Notices.' On the other hand, The Ledger has given two columns of the space on its editorial page to matter furnished by the liquor dealers, which was inserted in such a way that even a newspaper man wouldn't know that it was not genuine reading matter." I have several articles on the subject in the United Kingdom Alliance received by the last, mail, which throw light, upon it, but space prevents my making further extracts.—l am, Ac., William Fox.