STARTLING INDICTMENT

Southland Times, Issue 18756, 17 December 1919, Page 5

STARTLING INDICTMENT

BISHOP CLEARY SPEAKS OUT. WELLINGTON, December 15. The recent issue of Auckland’s Roman Catholic Magazine has just arrived in Wellington, and one of the most surprising features is the powerful editorial by his Lordship, Dr Clear)', Catholic Bishop of Auckland dealing w'ith the forthcoming poll on prohibition. One paragraph is headed:— HUMAN WRECKAGE. Dr Cleary ■writes thus regarding the liquor trade; “Herein lies one of the tragedies of the traffic in intoxicating drinks: the antagonism between the monetary interests of a large section of ‘the Trade’ and the welfare of the individual and the nation. Out in ‘No Man’s Land* close in front of the trenches where we served as a military chaplain there lay the piled up or scattered bodies —all unburied,of over 3000 gallant colonial storm troops that had been destroyed by a sudden whirlwind of fire from the nearby Gentian lines. That moving spectacle of • battered bodies does not represent a tithe of the human wreckage left all over the 'dominion by the sins of a considerable section of ‘the Trade,’ whom neither moral suasion nor the civil laws nor the appeals of pity have been able to bring within control. And the less appeal is to conscience in ‘the Trade the more must the State rely for reform upon its power and right of repressing a traffic, the evils of which it has hopelessly failed to reduce to the limit of tolerance or moderation. As to the right of a State "to suppress the liquor traffic, said the great Catholic Archbishop Spalding, there can be no question, since the right to suppress crime involves the right to suppress its chief cause.” “It is the sias and the sinmaking and crime attendant upon the operations of ‘the Trade’ that have created the evils; they have furnished it with its chief-driv-ing force; they have made it (in our personal view) a wholesome necessity in a land that will give its best to the shaping of the new and better era, that is (we hope) I at hand.” Advt. 953.