A LIVELY DEBATE.

Tuapeka Times, Volume XVIII, Issue 1179, 12 September 1885, Page 3

A LIVELY DEBATE.

The Licensing Bill now before the Victorian House of Representatives lately gave rise to a lively debate. Referring to the "one bar" clause, Mr Gaunson said that if the bill became law they would have a Jack-tar, a little sprung, drinking at the same bar with a gentleman in a claw-hammer coat and white choker. There were many respectable hotels with more than two bars. . . Let those who favored the views of the teetotallers who pretended that they wanted to get rid of the drink traffic altogether, draw a comparison between the drinking and the teetotal nations of the earth. They would find that English and Anglo-Saxon races, the greatest beer-drinking nations of the eanh, and not the Chinese, Hindoos, blacks, or copper-colored races, were the real men of the earth. It was not the miserable tea-drinkers who showed to the front, and he objected to the people of this country being Chinafied. Hejobjected to our physical conditions undergoing a deterioration. The people of England showed themselves to be great men on the battlefields of Europe in the old beerdrinking days, and now they drank as much as ever, and more, the better they seemed to be. —(Laughter.) He abhorred drunkenness, but objected to teetotallers forcing their stuff down his throat. At a later stage Mr Nimmo said that when his hon. colleague told them that intoxicating liquors were necessary to form the bone and sinew of a mighty nation, he must have forgotten the teachings of history, Samson, the strongest man who had ever walked the earth was a teetotaller. So was Father Mat hew, who did more for Ireland than anyone else. Mr Bent : St. Patrick drove the snakes out. Did he not do more ?— (Hore, here. ) Mr Nimmo : Sr. Patrick wa3a teetotaller. — (Laughter.) Mr M'Lellan : He was a Scotchman. — (Laughter.)