STARTLING INDICTMENT.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume 45, Issue 14005, 16 December 1919, Page 6

STARTLING INDICTMENT.

BISHOP CLEARY SPEAKS OUT,

(From a Special Correspondent.) WELLINGTON, Dec 15.

The recent issue of the Auckland Roman Catholic magazine, "The Month," has just arrived in Wellington, and one of the most surprising features is a powerful editorial by His Lordship Dr. Cleary, Catholic Bishop of Auckland. Dealing with the forthcoming poll on Prohibition, one paragraph is headed - ' Human Wreckage.' ?

Dr. Cleary writes thus regarding the liquor trade: —

"Herein lies one of the tragedies "of the traffic in intoxicating drink. "The antagonism between the mone"tary interests of a large section of " 'The Trade , and the welfare of the "individual and the nation. Out in "No Man's Land, close in front of '' the trenches where we served as a

"'military chaplain, there laid the pil- '' ed lip. or scattered bodies —all un- " buried —of over three .thousand gal"lant colonial storm troops, that had

4•' been destroyed by a sudden whirl - "wind of fire from the nearby Ger"inan lines. That moving spectacle "of battered bodies does not represent a tithe of the human wreck"age left all over this Dominion by '' the sins of a. considerable section of " 'The Trade,•" whom neither moral "suasion nor the civil law nor the ap"peal of pity has been able to bring "within control. And the less ap"peal there is to conscience in 'The "Trade/ the more must the State "'rely for reform upon its power and "right of repressing a traffic, the ev"ils of which it has hopelessly failed "to reduce to the limits of tolerance "or moderation." "As to the right "of a State to suppress the liquor "traffic/ said the great Catholic, "Archbishop Spalding, 'there can be "no question, since the right to sup- " press crime involves the right to "suppress its chief cause.' It is the "sins, and the sininnking and crime "attendant upon the operations of " 'The Trade' that have created the

"movement for its abolition; they "have furnished it with its chief dri"ving force; they have made it (in ''onr personal view) a wholesome "necessity in a land that would give "its best to the shaping of the new "and better era that is (we hope) at '' hand. •''