The Star. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 1904. THE ALLIANCE MANIFESTO.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 8109, 7 September 1904, Page 2

The Star. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 1904. THE ALLIANCE MANIFESTO.

The manifesto issued yesterday by the New Zealand Alliance eonfinns, officially and collectively, the antipathy shown by the individual prohibition leaders to the Premier's Licensing Bill. .While admitting that the Bill contains many valuable amendments of a minor character, the Alliance contends that in its most essential provisions it strikes at the very rodt of the powers that the people have enjoyed without interruption, since 1893. The censure of the Alliance is distributed pretty evenly over the whole Bill, but it is chiefly directed against the clauses providing for the abolition of- the reduction issue, clause 10, which is clause 9 of last year's Bill in. a revised form, the provision to appoint Government agents as distributors of liquor in no-licerise districts, and the clause authorising a reference' to the electors of the question of State control. ( The elimination of the reduction issue is characterised as " a. violation of democratic right and public faith t and the most strenuous resistance to it is promised. As for clause 10, it is summed up as a combination of "tyranny, hypocrisy and contradiction," and both it and. its author are lashed with all that freedom of invective that the average prohibitionist knows well how to command. The clause is stigmatised as tyrannous, because to make the possession of liquor a crime, the effective detection of which would require the right of search in every house ; it is hypocrisy, because it emanates not from the people who desire to suppress the liquor traffic, but from those who wish to perpetuate it ; and it involves contradition, because "should the no-license no-liquor proposal ever be carried' it will be ohiefly by the votes of those who have . also voted against no-licensej who believe in no-liquor even less than "they do in nolicense, and who vote for. it simply because they disbelieve in it and hope that its un: popularity may discredit a reform which will be otherwise irresistible." As usual, the prohibitionists do not mince matters when criticising anything which they believe to be inimical .to their cause.' Does . it ever strike them that the selfsame terms with which ; they have condemned clause 10 have been applied to the attitude of various seotions of their own party on the v liquor question. The avowed aims of that section to abolish the sale and distribution of liquor in the colony ia characterised, as tyrannous by many people who are not supporters of the *' Trade"; we have heard the tactics employed by another section to capture the "moderate" vote ' con-' demned as hypocritical; and the contemporaneous utterances of the leaders of the prohibition party so often contradict one another that a puzzled public will welcome the clear-cut passages in yesterday's manifesto with something approaching a sigh of relief. It did not need the manifesto to tell us that the prohibitionists were opposed to State control. If there was one point on which the prohibition critiorsms of the Premier's Bill were universally agreed, it was in denouncing the State control provisions. They were inopportune, undesirable, crude, unworkable, in fact all , that was bad, and in the of one prominent member of the party, they providied "a fire: escape for the brewer and the publican." After .criticism -of this kind, it i« not surprising to find the Allu ance condemning the proposal to appoint a •State officer to receive end distribute liquor in a no-license district as " containing the germ of State control of an uncontrollable traffic." This sentence reveals the root of th« prohibitionists' attitude towards the liquor traffic. "It cannot be controlled," they declare. This is the point at which they and other liquor reformers separate. The latter, who are quite as earnest in their desire to rid the country of the evils attributed to the drink traffic, hold that it is possible to control the traffic. To them State control offers a solution', of the problem, and we believe they would be glad if Parliament granted them the privilege of voting on the proposal which the Premier has embodied in his Bill.