TRADE TOPICS.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume VI, Issue 278, 21 November 1895, Page 12

TRADE TOPICS.

I promised in the last issue to give a line each week to the different popular barmaids in town. My second choice is fairly well known, so I leave it to her admirers to guess who it is’:— She’s as full of Old Nick as an eg-g is of meat, When she starts on the joh just to listen’s a treat; She can barrack and chaff you, and laugh at you too, And at billiards she shines as a fairly good screw. I won’t tell her name, but her eyes and her hair Are as black as the night, though her features are fairy Only one thing I’ll say. and I’ll swear it is so, If you want a good shandy, just sing out for Jo. It is a favourite theory with the teetotal party that because licenses are renewed every year that therefore they only last twelve months, and that licensed victuallers are only entitled to compensation for a year or a fractional part of it. The reason why licenses are renewed annually is to give magistrates an opportunity of reviewing the conduct of the houses, and not of refusing licenses unless misconduct was proved. All the legislation of recent years, both at Home and in the colonies, has tended in the direction of safegarding the license-holder, which goes to prove that the license is not merely an annual tenancy. If it were only an annual tenure, what would become of the death duties and the custom derived from revenues and excise duties ? The inevitable prohibitionist has naturally turned up on the mining fields. I clip from the Thames Advertiser : —“ A meeting of the Prohibition League was held in the Congregational Church last evening. In the unavoidable absence of the President, Mr M. Whitehead was vote’d to the chair. It was decided to endeavour to get branches of the League formed at Coromandel and Kuaotunu. It was also decided to, in future, hold regular monthly, meetings on the second Wednesday in the month. The meeting was closed with prayer.” I admire the pluck of the League, but 1 fancy that there is just about as much chance of the population on an average gold-field being converted to prohibition as there is the possibility of a cake of ice existing for any reasonable time in the hottest centre of Sheol. These superior persons, who devote their spare time to working in the interests of the millenium with payment for overtime in this world arid a huge bbnus in the next, should confine themselves to an easier job than the one they have undertaken.