INTEMPERANCE IN BELGIUM.

Otago Witness, Issue 2355, 13 April 1899, Page 62

INTEMPERANCE IN BELGIUM.

An attempt is being made to check tHd eyor-growing evils of intemperance in Belgium. A document has just been issued by; the Minister for Agriculture and Publia Works to the governors of provinces, in which he says:—"No means must be neglectedl., In this connection I cannot refrain from calling attention to the important assistance which can be furnished by the press. Ignorance is one of the principal causes of the abuse of alcohol. It has given rise to and led to the dissemination of favourable views in regard to the use of spirituous liquors* It is necessary to dissipate these errors, to instruct the masses in the physiological effects, as well as the social consequences of intemperance. Not a day passes on which the newspapers do not contain accounts of disorders, end even crime, engendered by alcohol. Nothing is more efficacious, from the point of view of the education of the people, than to bring these facts into the light of day, and to point out that it is to drink that they are due." A DRINK CASE AND ITS MORAL. A woman Mas last December convicted of the wilful murder of her sister in Spitalfields. She was, at the same time, recommended to mercy on the ground that the act was committed in a moment of drunken frenzy. The 6ole interest of her trial lay in its revelations of the sordidness and vice of the life of tho dissolute poor. The prisoner freely admitted that she had suffered almost countless ocnvictions for drunkennes.?, and for savage assaults —some of them with the knife. In the courso of Ihere affrays she had herself, accoiding to her own account, received "over twenty stabs." Commenting on the case, the Daily News makes the following grave and peitinent remarks, which it might very well thjnk of when discussing the question as to whether the principle of direct popular control should bo shelved by the Liberal party: —" Tho true import of the case is in its evidence of the drink, soualor, and bestial ferocity of temper and instincts from which most of these crimes spring. Our report ia a dreadful chapter on the miseries of the lowest scotal state. Every day's account of the cases in the courts will only" darken the horror of it, or fill in its details. Tho organised garigs of lads that patrol our streets, knifd and bludgton in hand, arc ninny of them maturing for their final appearnnco on a capital charge. They aro suffered to begin their lives in tho gutter, when they ought to be at school, and their predatory habit* are formed long before they reach the adult age. They are bred for ignoninco, idleness, and debauchery as carefully as some of U3 are bred for tho Humanities. Compare the ever-increasing splendour of tho publichouses with the poverty of most of the ministrant agencies for good, and we have the evil illustrated as in some great picture of doom. It is enough to make tho social reformers almost beside themselves for want of- a remedy. But a triumphant Tory party will eea that they do not lay their axe to the root of the tree. Whole masses of our population are swilling and idling themselves into perdition, and both law and custom are powerless to cay them nay. The gin shop, unless we look to it, may yet bring us down, as a nation from our pride of place."