A BLIGHT UPON HUMAN EXISTENCE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXII, Issue 19444, 2 November 1925, Page 2

A BLIGHT UPON HUMAN EXISTENCE

PROHIBITION’S MORBID INFLUENCE. (By W. CABELL BRUCE, United States Senator from Maryland.) “Under the morbid influence of national Prohibition, the most reputable J members of human society have been {brought into the closest working relations with the most disreputable. It [operates the grossest indiscrimination .between the wealthy individual, who has the money with which to lay in a large stock of liquors, and the worker who cannot afford to pay the high prices demanded for smuggled liquor, and who is forbidden to make even a 'little light wine or beer under his own 'roof. It has quickened to feverish and i dissipated extremes the love of cxcite'inent and adventure, which within bounds, is one of the most beautiful and ingratiating attributes of youth. It has brought brewing and distilling under the very eyes of young children in the home. The champions of Prohibition “are obliged to admit that drinking among women is rapidly increasing.” (Bishop Thomas Nicholson, of Chicago, President of the AntiSaloon League, in a speech at Washington, January, 1924). National Prohibi|tion has discouraged the use of mild ifermented liquors and stimulated the use of ardent spirits. For the temperlate and wholesome glass of wine oi I beer, it has substituted the hip-flask; it has filled the bowels of the people l with lethal poisons; it has settles like a blight upon the entire joyous side of human existence.” In the. face of such evidence, it i. absurd to expect New Zealand to shoulder a burden of which the I’nited States is already thoroughly sick and w6ary. 35