THINGS IN GENERAL. (To the Editor.)

Tuapeka Times, Volume XXV, Issue 4253, 29 June 1895, Page 3

THINGS IN GENERAL. (To the Editor.)

Sic, — You must surely have been napping when you allowed that paragraph from your correspondent, no doubt a beery correspondent, to get into your issue of the 19th instant. It is, I believe, true that Messrs Adams, Broad, and Co. are enthusiasts in the temperance cause; but I question if the word '•fanatic" is applicable to them. The national and social evil they are fighting is such that all they can say or all they can do, no more entitles them to the appellation given them by your Dunedin correspondent than the hurrying through our town some little time since of our Fire Brigade to extinguish burning gorse entitles the Brigade to the same terms of reproach. The temperance cause is a moral one, and as Mr Adams in his able but mild address pointed out on Thursday night, the temperance reformer has a moral basis upon which to stand, and in such cases the late John Bright said " violence of language is always justifiable." There is another evil in our midst besides the drink that requires attending to./ I am now referring to our roads. Our Borough Council are to be commended for getting some metal for our streets ; but are theyjustined in sending so far for it and paying so large a v sum as railway freight when we have so many thousands of tons of good metal at qur door and men out of work who could break it? I was at the Blue Spur the other day, ayd it appeared to me there was suliieieni; quartz and other hard metal there in the tailings to put all our roads in good repair. But what about the County Council having sand and unbroken pebbles or boulders put on our roads ? The former turns to mud, and the latter, like so many cricket balls, roll off the road. If these boulders were broken so as to have one or more flat surfapes, they would settle down and make good roads, as people, have elsewhere in Otago. Do those who have the control of the nioney raised in the shapo of taxes eyer feel that they have a moraj obligation to use it wisely and well ? One has just as much right to steal another's property as to waste it, and I am sure the road between Lawrence and Roxburgh, along- , side of which there is so much splendid, metal,

is a standing proof that money is wasted in patching it with sand. We have read much of late of the cruelty to animals meted out to some of the Dunedin tram horses. But what about the cruelty the fine animals are subjected to that have to struggle from here to Roxburgh and back through these winter months oil such a road ?— I am, etc., Humanity. Lawrence, 24th June.