LIQUOR GIVEN TO GIRLS

Taranaki Daily News, 28 March 1932, Page 6

LIQUOR GIVEN TO GIRLS

PREVALENT EVIL AT DANCES I TAINT ,UPON THE COMMUNITY. (PREACHER APPEALS TO OLD BOYS. Special reference to the prevalent evil of giving liquor to girls at dances was made by Canon E. H. Strong, late vicar of St. Mary’s, New Plymouth, and chaplain at the New Plymouth Boys’ High School, in a sermon at St. Mary’s yesterday morning during a special service in connection with the jubilee reunion of High School old boys. The preacher appealed to his congregation to take active steps to stamp out this virulent social menace. "There is one stone you have not yet removed,” said Canon Strong at the conclusion of his sermon, which was based on the first verse of the 20th chapter of St. John:—“The first day of the week cometh Diary Magdalene early, when it was yet dark, unto the sepulchre, and seeth the stone taken away from the sepulchre.” There is a stone that sadly needs to be rolled away from this New Zealand of ours. Do you think it is a manly thing to take a girl to a dance and make her drunk? I have seen morning after morning the results of what has been going on at dances in our own hall. Will you help to' stop this!” After the war people yielded to a reaction and went mad, continued Canon Strong, and that was how the evil practice came about. He agreed with Sir James Parr in his address to the old boys that if all the secondary schools of New Zealand banded together nothing could .stop them. Was New Zealand to be a decent, clean land? It rested with the young inen. The preacher then made a final appeal to the old boys of what he believed was the greatest school in Ne’w Zealand to unite aud help to remove the menace he had referred to. He hoped they would make every endeavour to raise the community from the sink into which it had fallen and remove the taint of uncleanliness and beastliness. . , ■ ’