PROHIBITION CAMPAIGN

New Zealand Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 11307, 5 September 1922, Page 6

PROHIBITION CAMPAIGN

THE POSITION IN AMERISA DR MARY ARAIOR AT WESLEY CHURCH. There was a full attendance in tile Wesley Church, Taranaki street, last night, when Dr Alary Harris Armor, LL.JJ., gave an address on prohibition. Mr A It. Atkinson, president of tho New Zealand Alliance, presided, and on the platform were also Airs Don, New Zealand president of tlie W.C.T.U., Miss P. Kirk, and Airs JohnstonWright, local rireeddente, and other leading workers in the prohibition movement. Dr Armor assured her hearers that the iiqnor trade was. lighting a losing fight. New Zealand would go dry sooner or later, and they might as veil surrender now. They had been hearing a great deal about what prohibition had not done, so she proposed to tell them some things it had done. She did not know of a single bad thing done by prohibition, but she did not claim that it had done everything, good; it was not perfect. In America the prohibition law was broken just as every other law was broken at times. There were murders and arson in tho States, but they had been there.before They were not the result, as some of its detractors sought to prove, of prohibition. Nor waa it possible to say that there was nobody in the United Staten opposed to prohibition. Such a statement would be absurd, but not so absurd as the statement published in the form o? a cable from America, that every wood woman in that country was opposed, to prohibition. What about Evangeline Booth, head of the Salvation Army’s great work there? Wasn’t she a good woman? What about Jane Addarns, ov Grace Abbott, head of the Federal Children’s Bureau, or Aire Chapman Calt ? Were they not good women ? and they were all prohibitionlets.. So was the head of the women’s police in. that country: Prohibition helped the poor man. Evangeline Booth stated that 300 men whose families the Salvation Army had helped because they spent their • wages on drink had bank aocounts now, and in odo hotel alone 25 men who had -never had a dime had money in the .bank. In New York and oilier cities there were • many women who dressed finely and wore diamonds and no doubt objected -to prohibition, but they were not the only good women in America. Prohibition had not brought the millennium, but because a law was broken that did not prove it a bad law. A® tor tile tales of the loss of revenue, Unemployment, eto.. Dr Armor quoted the case of one small town where these prpgrosucations had been made, and to.d how in three or four years it had grown te a thriving and prosperous community under prohibition. She assured her hearers America would never have voted for prohibition if it had not been a paying proposition. Did you ever see a man who drank himself rich, or prosperous, or happy, she ask-euP If a. country must have Jiquor to make jt prosperous then the most honoured m«n in the community should be the drunkard because he provides most towards the revenue. In the most prosperous days before the war there were soup kitchens in America, as, there were all over the world. After the war they had the same commercial depression as in other places and yet there was more money m the savings banks than, ever before, and this was the poor man’s money, not the rich man’s. Ahrs Armor oontradieted the statcinoo t made. that America voted prohibition while the men were *iway at the war. America had -been going dry for 61 years. Before she entered the war 34 States -had ■ voted dry, and one State voted itself dry after the Federal vote.- An eminent judge in Chicago had stated that complaints of wife and child abandonment had fallen 25 per cent, since prohibition, and Chicago was one of the worst towns in the world with a large foreign element. Investigation proved v that 20 per oent. of the gaols had beeh closed, and the rest of the gaol population had decreased 15 to 30 per cent. She quoted the statement of 200 police ohiefs that there was no abnormal crime wave there. She also stated that the death rate had fallen 50 per cent, since 1911, and while this could not be .put down wholly to prohibition comparisons of the death rate between wet iand dry States showed that it had a. great deal to do with it. In conclusion Dr. Armor said if anyone knew a oure for cancer, wouldn’t they go to the end of the world to tell about it? That was why she' had come to New Zealand to tell everyone wbat prohibition had done for hoi- country. You couldn’t expect to clean the whole place up in three or four years, but in time’they would do so. Prohibition was written into* the Constitution of the United States, and nothing would ever erase it.