PROHIBITION AND LIBERTY.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume XII, Issue 751, 28 July 1904, Page 24

PROHIBITION AND LIBERTY.

(Melbourne “ Brewers’ Journal.”) It is hardly likely that the Prohibition battle will be fought during the lives of the present Australian Parliaments, either Federal or State. 1 here are many subjects which will occupy political attention exclusively for some years, as it is now apparent to every thinker that in Australia we have come to the “ parting of the ways. It is. therefore, an imperative duty on the various associations connected with the trade that they should educate the people who, as voters, hold their existence in the hollow 7 of their hands. They have time enough to do so, but we cannot congratulate them on the use they have made of their opportunities hitherto. It is not the time for ad misericordiam appeals, which will not be listened to because they will inevitably be regarded as coming from a self-interested source, and, therefore, as of suspicious bona-fides. And yet it is plain that the battle the trade must light will be for freedom as much as that -which Pym. Hampden, and Vane, and their great contemporaries, fought against the Stuarts three hundred years ago. The tyranny of a many-headed democracy is no less iniquitous than that of a one-headed autocrat, although it may be more plausibly defended. A man claims the right of having- the direction of his oxvn life, and denies the justice of any man or men changing the conditions of existence for him. This is just what the teetotal faddists want to do. In their superlative wisdom they want to rectify the condiditions of existence imposed on mankind

by the Creator Himself and be “ the God of God.” It is a darino- flight and most daring despotism. 1 here never has been a moment in the whole history of human civilisation when that condition of existence was eliminated or in abeyance, and yet the faddist thinks that he can do the impossible and create a new heaven a *jd a new earth after his own pattern. He thinks he can manipulate the mechanical elements to such purpose that he can change good old Kbmely Nature herself. Well, he has a “ gie-guid conceit of himsel’,” and as long as he confines his experiments to himself we have no quarrel, but we think the unimproved pattern was blocked out by a much better artist, if he will permit us to say so. Of course no one advocates-the abuse of liquor, and if the faddist confined himself to the remedy of the abuse we could all sympathise. But he wilfully muddles cause and effect. In nine cases out of ten drunkenness is an effect, and not a cause. Scott recognised the beneficence of alcohol when he put these words into the mouth of Mag o-ie Mucklebackit, the fishwife : “ It’s easy for your honour and the like o’ you gentlefolk to say sae, that hae stout h and routh, and fire and finding, and meat and claith, and sit dry and canny by the fireside ; but an ye wanted fire and meat and dry claes and were deein’ o’ the cauld, and had a sair heart, whilk is warst ava wi’ just tippence in your pouch, wadna ye be glad to buy a dram wi’t, to be eilding and claes and a supper and heart’s ease intil the bargain, till the morn’s morning.” That’s just it : the whole thing in a nutshell. On one man,the faddist wants to impose the domination of his own opinion ; from another he wants to wrest his “ meat, and claes, and fire,” and these are the identical things the stupid, obstinate Stuarts wanted to do in free England in the seventeenth century, and paid the penaltv of their folly to the utmost farthing. Whether a man gets a drink or not is of itself a matter of very little importance, but that he should eat and drink at another person’s dictation is a widely different thing. Britons must be very much changed if they submit to any such tyranny, because in all their history and in all their social relations the freedom of the individual to exercise his own judgment in living his own life has been the first thing they claimed, and invariably made good their claim in the end.