Te Aroha AND Ohinemuri News. TUESDAY, MARCH, 9, 1909 THE OTHER WIDOW.

Te Aroha News, Volume XXVII, Issue 4383, 9 March 1909, Page 2

Te Aroha AND Ohinemuri News. TUESDAY, MARCH, 9,1909 THE OTHER WIDOW.

It was not really our intention to refer again at present to the issue of the Ohinemuri Licensing Poll Petition, but the expression of sympathy ycith “ those widows and other individuals,” on whom the loss will fall very heavily, and “in some cases indeed spell ruin, this expression of sympathy as uttered by Mr Arthur Myers, Chairman of the Auckland Brewers and Wine and Spirit Merchants’ Association, to a “ Star ” reporter seems to call for some consideration.

In the first place, let us say quite frankly, that if there is one aspect of the difficulties attendent upon temperance reform, which at once excites our commiseration it is that aspect presented by the incidental sufferer, whose capital has been invested in an enterprise which the public will decides to abolish. We cannot say that we sympathise with those who persist in remaining both blind and deaf to the manifest trend of rapidly mounting public opinion, so blind and deaf as to allow their capital to be invested in the unsafest investment possible. That they elect to remain so blind and so deaf seems to argue that there is in the liquor trade a wholly abnormal attraction, the promise in fact of the maximum of profit with the minimum of exertion. At the same time we do feel some pity for the “ widows' and other private individuals ” whose want of commercial acumen has permitted them to remain so financially insecure as that they are, perhaps toward theend of their lives deprived of their income.

But in the second place we protest most emphatically against Mr Myers’ wholly unallowable use of the words “ confiscation without com pensation,” because confiscation can only apply to a person’s actual possessions or rights, and can by no means be made to apply to the refusal by the people to renew a priviledge, which is held on a terminable tenure, and which the people feels cannot, without injury to itself be renewed. There is no confiscation in such an assertion of the public right to arrest rather than to sanction the continuance of a trade which the public considers hurtful to itself. If the holders of the various licenses up and down the Dominion cannot, with their eyes closed to the signs of the times, see what is coming to the particular kind of investment associated with the liquor trade, is that the fault of the people ? Is it the fault of the people that the trade continues to regard a merely renewable license as a right sort of personal property. Who has the hardihood to talk to the people about confiscating what already belongs to the people and to the people alone. It is the people’s to say whether the license which is the gift of the people shall or shall not be renewed, and we warn Mr Myers that when he begins to talk to Dominioners on the lines above indicated, he is dealing with the British sense of public rights, and is on very volcanic ground indeed. And in the third place we wish to remind Mr Myers of the other “widow,” who is a widow at all bscause of the trade which claimed her man as one among its thousands of annual human tribute ; of the other “ widow ” who is a widow in all but name, who would be better off a thousandfold if she were actually a widow ; whose forlorn cup of grief only the “ Pity sitting in the clouds ’’

ever “ sees into the bottom of.” We would (remind him of the terrified little children, the sheltered sweetness of whose young lives is yearly confiscated by a trade which scruples not to accept as spoil the man’s earnings, his lusty joy in life, his tender pride in wife and child, his last shred of manhood. Granted the man was a moral or physical weakling (perhaps both) in the sense of not being strong enough to withstand this one appetite, yet it is the other worse than “ widow ” and her hapless child who pay for his weakness, they and the State. The State pays, someone always does foot this bill, the whole of it, the moral wreck of it as well as the charge in coin, and whether it comes i

partly out of private pockets or not, still it is collective Society who pays, the State in fact. And the State has tie right to say, has no right not to say, “ Sir or Madam, I am right sorry to have allowed you the use of a dangerous privilege at all, but in view of all this moral, financid, and social wreckage, which is accumulating upon my hands as the result of the exercise of such a priviledge, I have decided not to renew it to you. ,