Less Drunkenness

Waipukurau Press, Volume XXIV, Issue 100, 27 August 1930, Page 7

Less Drunkenness

due to many causes. THE POSITION IN ENGLAND. * The following interesting comment appears in a recent issue of “The Church Times,” which is published m England. The majority of witnesses who have given evidence before the Licensing Commission, agree that drunkenness in this country has vastly decreased. This is due to a variety of causes -better education, with its consequent widening of interest, the cinema, the teashop, earlier closing, and the higher cost of alcoholic drink with its smaller potency. Certainly, there is now no case whatever for any further Puritanic interference with popular liberty, though there is still urgent necessity for such reform of the public house as * would make it a pleasant and comfortable meeting p l ace instead of, as it often is, a sordid drinking den. In this connection, there is considerably interest in the evidence given by a Scottish doctor before the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment. This gentleman asserted that teetotallers now form a large part of the prison population, and he suggests that the cinema is far more dangerous to social well-being than the public, house. We do not suggest that teetotalism is an incentive to crime, but it is fairly evident that a successful motor-bandit must, like Dickens’s converted toastmaster, drink nothing but cold water.