PROHIBITION

Te Aroha News, Volume XLI, Issue 6297, 2 November 1925, Page 5

PROHIBITION

STRIKING ADDRESS BY THE REV. FLETCHER Will the Liquor Traffic help or hin- ' der us in the next world crisis? was the question asked by the Rev, Fletcher in the course of an address given by him in the Theatre Royal on Friday evening last. The speaker said that he had studied the question at great length and came on to the platform without any personal animosity against any one connected with the liquor traffic. Many of his friends were connected with it, but he asked his audience to credit him with sincerity of motive. He referred to the great restlessness that is a universal trait at the present time. We are he said, supposed to be living in a state of peace, but in reality we are living on the brink of a volcano that may burst into eruption at any time and involve us in a greater turmoil than that of 1914. The only way to make the world safe from the demon of war was to take away the desire for war, to remove the feelings of jealousy and the burning lust for revenge. General Smuts, the great South African statesman, had said, “There is a cloud hanging over Europe as black as the cloud that burst and swept ancient ' Rome form the face of the earth.” A great thinker, writing in one of the world’s greatest papers, had said that the Pacific is to be the Mediterranean of the future. This statement might not convey much at the first, but when one stopped to think it held a world of meaning. All the great nations of the past rose and fell on the shores of that wonderful sea. Proceeding, the speaker briefly dwelt on the nations that lie on the shores of the Pacific, Canada, U.S.A., Central America, and the Latin Republics of the South. Crossing to the other side he showed Japan and China, the awakening nations of the East. Japan, with its 16 millions of people opening its doors to Western culture, was slowly gaining prominence among the nations; China, with its 450 millions, the mighty giant slowly awakening ofter a sleep of centuries. The Chinese has been pronounced by scientists to be the finest of human brains, and their physique was little short of marvellous. She possesses the greatest coal and iron deposits in the world. ,This awakening of China must have one of two results, that of commercialisation or that of martialisation. If the former she will be able, by reason of her industrial conditions, to flood the world’s markets with cheaper goods than any other country can possibly produce. Such an influx would alter the economic position of the world. Jf; on the other hand, it is the latter, history will repeat itself, and red in tooth and claw, with no restraint of Christianity th’e countless hordes of the East will sweep across Europe overwhelming by mere weight of numbers as they did in the days of long ago. Passing from China, the speaker brought his audience across the ocean to Australia and'New Zealand. When the inevitable development of trans-Pacific commerce peaches its zenith in the next few decades New Zealand will occupy the same position in this hemisphere as Britain now holds in the other. She will be the centre of this great commercial zone and must necessarily develop accordingly. On the other hand, in the event of war in the Pacific, she cannot but be engulfed in it. She will be the. centre of the next world conflict. And -fiere the question intrudes itself, “Will the liquor traffic help or hipder us in the great conflict?” The only way to find an answer to that question is to observe the effect of the liquor traffic on the conditions of war time life during the last war. At the time of the last great crisis he, the speaker, was in charge of the greatest church in the British Empire, in Cardiff, a church with a capacity for 3000 people. Six hundred and fiftyseven men went to war from that congregation alone. In 1916 it was discovered that there was only two months’ supply of food in England, continued the speaker, and he went on to describe the horrors of that period; when from noon to night queues of 2000 and more waited daily outside the shops in order to draw their miserable allowances of food. In the middle of winter, too, when children froze to death in those awful queues. “England was nearer a revolution in those days than most people ever realised,” said Mr Fletcher. “The rations allowed were: 6oz sugar per week, 2oz butter or Mb margaine, Boz meat and 4oz bread per day..” But, continued Mr, Fletcher, while there mas a shortage of foodstuffs and of shipping and railway rolling stock to carry foodstuffs from overseas and to carry munitions and supplies to the b<*s “over there,” the breweries were able to get thousands of tons of sugar and hundreds of thousands of tons of grain to use or the manufacture of alcoholic liquors, and always had unlimited railway and shipping freight at their command for its disposal. Thus it was, he pointed out, that the liquor traffic had battened and fattened on the nation’s miseries during the last world crisis and thus again would it do here in New Zealand in the next. He finished his addres with an appeal to his hearers to foster the spirit of patriotism and to keep unsullied the splendid physique of this glorious young nation, so that tjiey would be able to meet unflinchingly anything that the future might hold.