TEMPERANCE.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 771, 10 December 1886, Page 6

TEMPERANCE.

CARDINAL MANNING ON “THE

NATIONAL VICE:’ Fortnightly Review.

Governments, magistrates, :and police have labored, or seemed to ,labor, for these-,three hundred years to diminish or to control the spread of intemperance. They are too remote to influence the millions of the people. The coercive power of the police defeats ; itself. What is wanted is not a mechanical repression, by a dynami-cal power which can only be found elsewhere. It has never been found in the upper classes of society. They are too far removed from the life of the people to he conscious of the immensity of the evils which exist below their own level in life:; or they are directly interested as capitalists or as possessors of house property.-; or they are prejudiced by the Imprudence and exaggeration of certain persons, and will neither see nor listen; or they are too delicate to touch so vulgar a subject; or they are refined free livers themselves.; or they are thoughtless of the wreck of souls; or, though never intoxicated, they are sometimes not sober; or they belong to the pessimum genus otiosorum, the worst sort of idlers, triflers, and jokers, who, If they are ever serious, lament the evils ,of intemperance, and then mischievously obstruct 'the labors of more earnest men who are striving to save men; women, and children from the havoc of drink. It is a sad truth that, though in our upper, classes there .is an ardent and resolute minority laboring against our national vice, there is a vast majority, either too deeply interested, or too little in earnest, to help those .whom, consciously or unconsciously,: they are persistently hindering. It is-sueh as these who were forward some years ago in opposing Sir Wilfred Lawson, because his bill, as they said, was only a Permissive Bill, and not an Imperial and universally coercive bill. They well knew that before such a universal coercive bill could be carried the end of the world would come. And if it had been carried it would have been a. dead letter, for nothing could have enforced it short of martial law. Nevertheless, men of this kind were wont to declaim eloquently on the impossibility of making a nation sober by Act of Parliament, and arguing that sobriety can only be attained by moral .means. We heartily accept this half-truth, and It is precisely because we believe that our national vice can only be cured by a spontaneous, national, and moral movement, that we affirm that the only adequate power for its correction-must come not from above, but from below. :It is in the people themselves alone, who have been so long beset by the multiplying facilities for intemperance, by übiquitous activity of the drink trade, by the almost irresistible attractions of the gin palaces—it; is only in the spontaneous action of the people, rising with their high moral sense in reaction against the ay-stem -which 'has so long made their homes desolate and their lives intolerable, that an adequate «emedy can be found. We have already •seen that, in the measure in which the suffrage has been extended, the peqple have returned to Parliament men pledged for local option. A still more luminous proef of this fact may be found in our colonies, in Which popular self-goverment exists in its fullest rand (healthiest form. Already in the Dominion of Canada, in Australia, and in New Zealand, the young and popular legislatures have.closed the publichouses oo.Sunday, and<a,re giving powers of Local Option to the people. It is,impossible not to foresee that the example of ’ the Colonies Will -react upon the mother country. Already Scotland and Ireland have Suaday Closing Acts. In spite -of every form of evasion and opposition the Sunday Closing Act in Wales holds it 3 ground. -Yorkshire, Durham, and Cornwall, with a-singular unanimity, have forced upon Parliament the -Sunday closing movement. For-the last six or seven years their bills have 'been blocked, talked* out, and contemptuously rejected. But this will not be for ever. "There is an onward movement in the publie opinion and in the moral sense of this country, which renders it inevitable that before long the people will obtain from. Parliament a local vote in the matter of publichouses, as they already possess in the matter of education. Some years ago the Pall Mall Gazette, in treating of the suffrage of women, avowed its belief that, if women could vote, the Permissive Ejill would be carried at once. Nothingcan bemore certain; for as our national vice wrecks the domestic life of the people* it is upon the women of the United Kingdom that the full and fierce misery springing from intemperance falls in Its dire intensity. 'f