THE LIQUOR TRADE.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE INDEPENDENT.
SlB, — The last fortnight has been fruitful of what tho toetotallers call " Bottle and Barrel work," and must, I should hope, have produced some effect on the minds of the supporters of the liquor trade. The reinarkablo feature is, that all four cases which have been before the public eye, have come home to the hearths of the publicans, and given them a taste of the misery aud suffering their trade inflicts habitually upon others. First, a woman, who a few years ago waa a member of a Christian church, and a Sunday school teacher, passes through the too common career of a publican's wife, aud ends by burning herself to death, incapable almost of giving an alarm to her husband asleep in the next room. "Next a drunken hanger on at a public-house, who had been allowed apparently to get drunk every night at his master's ' tap, burns himself to death, and his master's stables to ashea. This man's career might, I think, suggest some pertinent inquiries to the licensing jii3tices next sitting day. Then two publicans, who had placed their wives in the furnace of temptation,, where thoy yielded to the seductions of the poison they sold to others and to the blandishments of flash barmen, call in the aid of the Divorce Court, both in one week, to relieve them from the position into which their own act had brought them, casting out of course the poor wretched victims whom thoir ungodly trade had reduced from amiable and affectionato wives to drunken and filthy prostitutes. Your contemporary, the " Advertiser," has a Btiff article on these divorce oases, and I am glad to see that it has le,d him to the conclusion that the liquor trade must be tuken in hand by our legislators. But why did he not find this out before ? Was it not till tho domestic peace of tho publican himself began to be invaded that the evils of this traffic became apparent ? Alas, all that tho whole body of publicans have suffered in debauched wives, blackguard offspring, divorce and insolvency courts, is but the veriest mite of the misery and ruin their trade has brought on thousands and millions of others. — I have, &c. A. M. Hitdob.
THE LIQUOR TRADE.
Wellington Independent, Volume XXVI, Issue 3252, 15 July 1871, Page 2
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