COUNTING THE COST.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 19142, 7 October 1925, Page 6

COUNTING THE COST.

(By HENRY BOURNE JOY,

(Published bs Arrangement.)

A LAWLESS BUSINESS. CORRUPTION RAMPANT.

Director Packard Car Co., and formerly Director Federal Reserve Bank at Chicago.) " The almost countless millions of dollars which hava been appropriated and spent in five years to accomplish the enforcement of bone dry Prohibition have failed in that accomplishment. Not only has 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 has been foregoing during that period a revenue which it might readily have io 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 tc gaol, to associate with thugs, murderers, 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 alwavs will take such risks for easy money, they are not cheating our eus- : t-oms" nor defrauding the Government of revenue, because there is no duty on the goods imported. They take the risk for the easy money. Again human nature prevails. " It is perfectly state to-day that this country cannot survive with half of its people trying io pat the other half of its population in the penitentiaries of our country for following the natural dictates of human in-stincts."—-The North American Review. 1925. A law which makes criminals of people who are not criminals, and which would transform this country into a kind of nennl settlement, is not a fit law fof New Zealand.