THE PUMP’S IDEA OF FAIR PLAY.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume XIII, Issue 752, 4 August 1904, Page 23

THE PUMP’S IDEA OF FAIR PLAY.

There is an old Rocky Mountain story about a trapper who, meeting a bear in a very tight place, addressed himself to the Almighty in prayer. “I do not ask, oh, Lord,” he said, “that you should give me any advantage over the b’ar ; all I ask is that you won’t give the b’ar any advantage. Just see fair play.” This, roughly speaking, is the attitude of mind in which the Trade recently approached the Government. “Let” —they said .in effect —“let the people of the Colony decide whether there is to be a legitimate trade in liquor, under proper control, or a lawless traffic in all the vile abominations that make men drunk and drive them into the lunatic asylums. Only let the question be put in such a way that all. the electors in the country will see that it is to their interest to vote. If the majority of the people decide that there is to be no trade in liquor, so be it ; but do not allow the prohibitionist party to buy votes at the price of si grog-shops.” The fine distinction drawn by one of the deputation of alleged teetotallers that waited on the Premier the other day will deceive nobody, not even the rest of the teetotal party. It was this, that whereas the people had the right to deal with social sins, the sins of individuals were no affair of the public. Drunkenness is not a moral offence so long as it is not contracted in the public-house. What a pity it is that the no-license party should be endowed with so little wisdom. Is there a man of the world, or a professional man, who does not know that home drinking secret drinking, is an evil by the side of which the inordinate consumption of liquor in hotels sinks into insignificance ? We do not, of course, admit the right of the prohibitionist to interfere with the drinking habits of the people at all. except in the rational and admirable way of reclaiming individual cases of excess, but there is something exceedingly grotesque in the spectacle of a fanatic locking the hotel door with one hand and offering the customer as much liquor as he likes to drink with the other —and not good liquor either. The Pump party’s platform has only cne plank—“ Down with the Trade.” The party doesn’t care how much drink is consumed, so long as the sale of liquor is not legitimised, just as they do not min’d how widespread immorality may become, so long as the law does not recognise it. They don’t care for the inside condition of the sepulchre, so long as it is nicely whitewashed o* the outside. They ask the Government to crush the Trade in the interests of the sly grog-seller, but they do not recognise the sly grog-seller. They ask that the Trade may be squashed in the interests of “fair play and democracy.” Fair play ! Imagine the fair play that the average patron of a sly grog-shanty gets. Democracy ! What sort of government of the people is it that subjects a large section of that people to the horrors of the shebeen ? We say nothing here of the atrocious injustice which the prohibitionist fanatic is seeking to inflict upon those engaged in the trade. It is enough to indicate what is likely to happen to the “people” whom he would deliver over to the tender mercies of the scum of the earth. “Fair play and democracy !” To see such fair words put to such ignoble use is enough to make an honest man sigh. Also, the sight of the Isitts. and the Taylors, and the Atkinsons dishonouring the business that a Father Matthew ennobled somehow suggests pigs in a flower garden.