Saunders v. Whisky.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 4912, 22 January 1889, Page 2

Saunders v. Whisky.

{Evening Post.)

The election of Mr William Saunders as member for Lincoln is a matter for regret, i We cannot, perhaps, blame the electors for i preferring him to Mr John Ollivier, but they should not have been reduced to any such choice. Canterbury kas' plenty of 1 better men than either, and it betokens a i low condition of political vitality when we find the best men abstaining from offering i themselves, and apparently content to let the representation fall into tho hands of men i of tho Yerrall or Saunders calibre. Mr Saunders will do no good in tho House for himself, his constituents, or the colony. He belongs quite as distinctly as his late opponent, Mr Ollivier, to the politically played-out class. Ho may not, indeed, like that gent.Jeman, have a personal grievance which he desires to ventilate in Parliament, but he is a soured and disappointed man, who has had many chances of" public usefulness in the past, but has missed them ; all. He will be a recruit to the skinflint [ party, and will probably outvie even Mr Goldie himself in cutting down salaries and experimenting to ascertain the very smallest sum upon which a Civil’ servant . can possibly manage to maintain life, t Tho Service will have a bad time of it with Mr Saunders, and ho will be great when ; iho Estimates are before the House. Econo- ; mist though ho be, we venture, however, to . predict that he will next session cost the country more in taking up time with tho discussion of his absurd State distillery scheme than ho will bo instrumental in saving by any reduction of tho Estimates. This State Distillery is Mr Saunders’ special “ fad ” at the present moment, and Lincoln being an agricultural district, he no .doubt owes tia election to the visions which he has conjured up among the farmers of vast crops of barley which the State will always be ready to buy for whisky making, at a fixed and highly remunerative price. It is a singular fact that while advocating a scheme of this kind, Mr Saunders is a pronounced abolitionist. He wants the State to assume the monopoly of tho manufacture of whisky, for the benefit of the agricultural interest, while for the benefit of the community generally ho advocates the total prohibition of tbe drink traffic.' .We do not know precisely how he proposes to reconcile, the two opinions, nor indeed is it worth enquiring. He is almost ns great u teetotal zealot as Sir William Fox himself, and well nigh, as intemperate in its advocacy, but on this particular subject of a State distillery they differ very widely, and when they met not long ago on a public platform to discuss the subject, the knight made mincemeat of the would-be distiller’s arguments, and utterly discomfited him. Of course, however, even Sir William Fox failed to carry conviction to what Mr Saunders terms his mind, and so he has persisted throughout the election in making tho manufacture of whisky a plank of his platform. And the Lincoln farmers have been gulled accordingly, even as their neighbours of Ashley were gulled not so long ago by Mr Yerrall’s scheme of getting cheap money by means of a State Bank. Of the two schemes, we prefer Mr, Yerrall’s. There may be some solid good at the bottom of the latter, although Mr Yerrall; has not the wit to develop it, but the State distillery idea is simply preposterous, and could produce nothing but disaster were it tried. Indeed, the experiment of permitting distillation at all in the colony, apart altogether from the State undertaking the work, has already been tried and failed. It was attempted with a view of helping tho agricultural interest, and all the arguments now used by Mr Saunders to show that it would do so were trotted out then, but they failed to stand the teat of practical experience. The distillers made efforts certainly, but they exhibited a strange perversity in preferring sugar to barley as a material to make it from, no doubt because it was cheaper. The quantity of barley used was found to be very small indeed, • and ultimately it was found that tbe differential duty accorded as' an encouragement to the new industry was causing such an enormous loss to the revenue that Parliament was glad enough to pay heavy compensation to shut the distilleries up. Wo do not think Mr Saunders will induce tho Legislature to repeat the experiment in any shape or with any variations.