The Poverty Bay Herald AND East Coast News Letter. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume VI, Issue 806, 11 June 1879, Page 2

The Poverty Bay Herald AND East Coast News Letter. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 11, 1879.

The Tribune is a new evening newspaper very lately started in Dunedin. . It professes to be the friend and advocate of the people's rights and liberties. As it does not say what these rights and liberties consist of, we are left in doubt to discover. Thoroughly - radical in tone, the Tribune nevertheless has some very trenchant and sensible articles upon subjects social and domestic, as well -as political. In commenting on the Licensing Laws of the colony, our contemporary says :• — " We claim to be second to none in our desire to see the curse of the colony — drunkenness — repressed and kept within as small' bounds as possible, but we have our • own ideas' as to how the people of New Zealand, should be made and kept, sober, and we venture to say that all the regulations on the subject that have taken place within the hist two years have done little or no good. It may be true that no lights are to be seen in most of our hotels after 12 o'clock at night, and that when some unfortunate publican is caught selling liquor on Sunday, he is fined heavily, and lectured very severely oh the enormity of his offence j but all this is just mere ' sham, aud the administrators of the existing law, as well as: the general 'public, know this perfectly well. ■iWhen acts of the most stringent character are passed for the regulation of the traffic in intoxicating drinks,

and when the men who waste days and weeks of valuable time in passing them, and the officers who are paid to enforce them, know perfectly well that they can never be carried out, we think we are quite justified in asserting that there is something radically wrong somewhere, and we have no hesitation in saying that the fault lies^ with those well meaning, but rather silly gentlemen who appear to think that it is their mission on earth to make their fellow-men sober. The question which we have opened up is a large one, and we have neither time nor space to discuss it in all its details. All we desire to do is to point out a feifr facts which, the every-day experience of nine-tenths of our readers will enable them to accept as true, and then to ask the temperance reformers whether all they have achieved up to the present time — or nearly all — is not calculated rather to demoralise than to benefit those to whom their attention has been devoted. In tlie first place the law Strickly forbids the sale of liquor in a licensed house on Sunday to any but bona-fide travellers, and the penalties that may be, and generally are, inflicted for any infringement of this provision of the Act are very severe. Does any sane man suppose that the sale of liquor on Sunday is limited to bona-fide travellers 1 Every man who has experienced enough to 'entitle him to express his opinion on the subject, knows well that there are not twenty licensed houses in Dunedin where drink cannot be purchased at any hour on Sunday, and we have no hesitation in saying that the police are quite cognisant of the fact." As a matter of fact, the law with regard to Sunday trading is inoperative in this respect, and the sooner we open our eyes to the fact and have it wiped off our statute book the better. The moderate drinkers, who are a large class, have a right to be considered in all legislation on this subject, and we do not see any reason why they should be deprived of. an opportunity of obtaining on Sunday the small quantity of liquor which enables them to pass their lives more pleasantly on other days in the week. It is surely better that men should be able to go to respectable hotels and purchase what they want openly, and without the knowledge that they are contributing to an infringement of the law, than that they should, in the words of a recent work dealing with the liquor law of Scotland, •• Gang thrice to kirk, and in the evening glooms, Get beastly drunk in their back sitting rooms." Whether it may reasonably be regarded as effecting a moral improvement in a man to make an ineffectual attempt to deprive him of his beer on Sundays, and compel him to become a hypocrite and law-breaker to obtain it, is a- question we /will leave Sir William Fox and his friends to answer, in the full conviction that they will find it a hard nut to crack. Our Jago's and such like small fry will, no doubt, crack the nufc off-hand, but then " Fpols rush in where Angels fear to tread."