A PROHIBITION APOSTLE

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume IX, Issue 675, 12 February 1903, Page 20

A PROHIBITION APOSTLE

An old friend of ours has come to light in the State of Victoria as the founder of a Prohibition party on the lines of the organisation that is aiming at converting New Zealand into a Tom Tiddler’s ground. His name is John Hosking. He came originally from America, the land which also gave us the saintly Worthington; and it is a curious circumstance that one of Mr Hosking’s first achievements here was to unmask the apostle of the Temple of Truth. He was then a Wesleyan minister at Christchurch, and had he performed his task with a not quite so obvious desire to please the gallery the colony might have felt grateful to him. Not that Worthington stood in need of much “ exposing,” because he had been “ shown up” by his own acts, and, until he started on the swindling racket, he was, after all, only one of the great army of religious "quacks to which, if some of MrHosking’s whilom admirers are to be believed, that gentleman himself belongs. The itinerary principle operating in the Wesleyan Church subsequently brought Mr Hosking to this province and planted him at Hamilton, where he was soon to acquire a huge reputation as a prohibitionist and a bitter foe to all who were engaged in the licensed victualling trade. In the vehemence of his tirades and the venom of hie he was a match for

some of the street orators we have had in Auckland ; but it was his ill-luck, or his evil destiny, to be bitten by the political flea, and he burned to go ii to Parliament. The Church objected, and he told the Church to mind its own business But the Church was not to be flouted, and the reverend gentleman (who, by the way, is an LL.D, of some minor American university) was forced to choose between politics and the pulpit. He imagined that he had a soft thing on, and he chose politics. Rapidly ensuing events showed that the “ thing” was not so very soft, and that in order to make it as soft as possible the reverend doctor would have to relax his hitherto unflinching prohibition principles. He relaxed, and to the unspeakable horror of the Rev. Mr Gittos, boldly advocated licenses in the King Country 1 His recantation did not save him, and Mr Lang beat him badly at the polls After this, and for a time he clung to the prospect of a seat in the Upper House, though he never had the ghost of a hope; then he fell back on religion, and started a church of his own at Mount Eden ; and lastly he finds himself in Melbourne. Where he has been in the interval we do not know, but there was a kind of poetic justice in the circumstance of his u getting in at the death” in connection with Worthington. And now he is once more on the prohibition stump ! Do men gather figs from thistles ?