ANNUAL LICENSING MEETINGS, JUNE, 1907.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume XV, Issue 895, 2 May 1907, Page 21

ANNUAL LICENSING MEETINGS, JUNE, 1907.

Kaipara, Saturday, Ist June, to be adjourned to 28th June, Court House, Dargaville. Manukau, Saturday, Ist June, to be adjourned to 15th June, Court House, Onehunga. Marsden, Saturday, Ist June, Court House, Whangarei. City of Auckland, Tuesday, 4th June, S.M. Court, High Street. Franklin, Tuesday, 4th June, Court House, Mercer. Parnell, Wednesday, sth June, Borough Council Chambers, Parnell. Waikato, Wednesday, sth June, Court House, Hamilton. Ohinemuri, Wednesday, sth June, Court House, Paeroa. Bay of Plenty, Wednesday, sth June, Court House, Tauranga. Eden, Thursday, 6th June, Epsom Hall, Epsom. Waitemata, Friday, 7th June, Borough Council Chambers, Devonport. Thames, Friday, 7th June, Court House, Thames. Bay of Islands, Friday, 7th June, Court House, Kawakawa.

THE ETERNAL QUESTION.

The defeat of the Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill, the appearance of Jane Cakebread at the police-court, and the threat to legislate the barmaid out of existence, were a t one time the three most persistent recurrers in the annals of the year’s happenings. But in this finite world all things come to an end sooner or later. The Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill will one day attain to the dignity and oblivion of an Act, while Miss J. Cakebread has already disappeared as effectively as Mr Wertheimer’s pictures. The barmaid is still with us, but the prospect of legislation to put an end to her term of usefulness is now greater than ever, and the necessity for making an active stand agains: the mischievous proposals of Mr Herbert Gladstone and his following of ill-informed, interfering, and insolent busy-bodies is correspondingly greater also. We have always advocated the continuance of the employment of women in licensed premises, both on the behalf of women, to whom such employment affords the means of making an honest, clean, and independent living, and in the interests of public morality. We resent any attempt that is made to close this means of livelihood against a body of women who are as respectable, as competent, and as trustworthy as the people who are agitating for their removal, and we emphatically resent the insulting grounds upon which they base their demand for their abolition. When the Home Secretary ventilated his conviction that “the employment of girls and women in bars was open to objection on grounds of health, economic disadvantages, temperance, and morals,” he flung his insult not only at the women so employed and their employers, but at the community at large.

There can be no difficulty whatever in proving that, in the matter of health, the barmaid is catered for as well, and better than, nine-tenths of the women who have to work for their livings, and it is a fact that a large percentage of the girls who dispense intoxicating beverages are themselves teetotallers. Indeed, the temperance objection is the most obsolete kind of bogey that ever put the fear into a Radical politician. It is not easy to handle Mr Gladstone’s objection to the economic disadvantages of the present barmaid system, because we do not see to whom the disadvantage applies. It cannot surely be to the employees? Yet we cannot believe this concern is on behalf of the employers. Nor can we understand how the economic conditions of the general public would be affected by the proposed change. We doubt if even the financial experts of the Wastrel party in the last County Council could demonstrate the economic advantage derived from throwing some thirty thousand women out of employment. But when Mr Gladstone refers to the moral objections to the engagement of females in licensed premises we are able to follow’ him once more ; and, presuming that he grants that the women so employed were moral when they entered the business, it may be inferred that their deviation from the strict path of virtue is brought about by the people with whom they come in contact. In other words, the questionable morality of which the barmaids as a class are suspected by the Home Secretary is attributable to about nine-tenths of the male popu, lation of the United Kingdom. It is only necessary to grant the inferior state of morality that prevails among barmaids to agree with Mr Gladstone’s conclusions. But we indignantly deny that barmaids are less moral than any other class of female workers, or female loafers, in the country. We are not disposed to accept Mr Hall Caine’s insinuations with regard to hospital nurses; we are not swallowing all the stuff that is written about the immorality of the stage; we suspect that most of the stories reflecting

upon the purity of lady typists have no foundation in fact; we don’t even believe that the Smart Set, out of whom Father Bernard Vaughan is making such bold

advertisement, is quite so abandoned and dissolute as we are asked to believe. But we unhesitatingly maintain that, in the matter of the domestic virtues, barmaids

are as well provided for as nurses, actresses, typists, or ladies of fashion. Vaughan, who was asked his views on the barmaid question, was only prepared with the artless rejoinder, “Every profession is more or less immoral, isn t it? If the eminent censor of the morality of Mayfair had assumed that a woman in every profession is more or less subject to temptation he would have come neayer the mark but if every calling into which the tempter pokes his übiquitous nose is to be closed to women, where, in the name of wonder, are we going to stop. Is the barmaid who spends the whole of her professional life in the publicity of a saloon more subject to temptation than the girl who is dependent upon .the good word of the shopwalker or the half-dozen men who have influence in the theatre, or of the male authorities in a factory. Ihe girl in domestic service has to run the double temptation which comes to her through the tradesmen’s employees and the male members of the family in which she is employed; and the lady typist is liable to experience the more subtle danger which arises from isolation with the Tempter upon whom she depends for her bread-and-butter. If contact with the masculine variety of the species is dangerous, then we declare that the gtrl m service, in the private office, in the hospital, and on the stage is in a position of more peril than the girl behind the bar; and we contend, further, that the latter is better placed to withstand the temptations that may be presented, to .her.. To say that a barmaid has to listen to indecent stories, or even swear-words, is to show an utter want of knowledge of the conditions that obtain in public-houses. Any girl with a penchant for obscenity can have her weakness satisfied without troubling the interior of a bar, where, moreover, she will pick up less bad lan-* guage than she will hear in the public streets. Where there is one blackguard who has no respect for the presence of a woman in a bar there are a score who will forcefully call him to book for any exhibition of characteristic laxity. Men are the natural protectors of women, and nowhere is a woman more safe than when surrounded bv a crowd of them.

Father Vaughan, who believes that every profession is more or less immoral, and Archdeacon Sinclair, whose beliefs

have obtained less publicity, have both announced their intention of devoting some consideration to the eternal question, and ihey will doubtless in due time communicate the result of their studies to the Home Secretary. Messrs Vaughan and Sinclair will, it may safely be surmised, obtain the data upon which they will form their opinions from the people who are agitating to have barmaids abolished, and it is on these second, third, or fourth-hand recommendations that Mr Gladstone will form the conclusions which will be embodied in the threatened legislation. But what we should like to ask is, what facts can be produced to show that the maid in the bar be morally inferior, or even subject to more temptation, than the girl who earns her maintenance, in any other walk of life. Before putting the legislative finger on barmaids it is obligatory on the authorities to ascertain if there are not other female workers who face greater perils, make less resistance, and should logically be removed first. If the percentage of undesirable women employed on licensed premises is not found to be less than that shown in at least three o-her classes of female workers, we will willingly pay the expenses of the Commit sion appointed to ascertain the facts, and advertise in every published newspaper in England our congratulations to the Government and the country upon the exceptional bill of moral health which the inquiry v ill have revealed. —London L.V. Gazette.

CHILDREN’S BENEFACTOR.

Death has revealed one of the best-kept ■ecrets of the philanthropical world. Everybody has heard of the mysterious gentleman who for three-and-twenty successive Christmastides has anonymously presented a new sixpence to every child in the London workhouses through the medium of the “Truth” Toy Shove but he name of the giver has only just leaked cut. In “Truth” of March 15 it is an--1 ounced that the benefactor was the late Sir Francis Tress Barry, of St. Leonard’s Hill, near Windsor. It was not till after Sir Francis had passed away that even the editor of “Truth” was allowed to know the name of the giver. In 1883,. when the “Truth” Toy Show was in its in-

fancy a commissionaire dropped, casually, into “Truth” office a week or two before Christmas with a parcel containing 5000 sixpences for the “Truth” Toy Show. Inside the parcel also was a note requesting that... the sixpences should be distributed by “Truth” to the workhouse children of London. The note was simply signed ‘.‘A Friend.” Year after year, till last Christmas, the anonymous donor renewed his gift; the parcel growing larger as London’s workhouse children increased in number, until last year it reached the big total of 11,000.

POLICE EVIDENCE.

In the March issue of the Wine and Spirit News and Australian Vigneron, the value of police evidence is gone into and that journal remarks that a question those connected with the liquor trade have often to ask themselves and others is—Why is the evidence of a police constable nearly always accepted in preference to the oath of anyone else ? Are all men liars—except a policeman ? These remarks are apropos of a case recently decided, where a conviction was obtained by two constables in the face of distinctly contradictory evidence by half-a-dozen “civilians,” as the members of our autocratic police force delight to style the general public. Now it is to the interest of the policeman to obtain a conviction, this being counted unto him as a good work. The temptation to him is, therefore, greater to exaggerate or distort facts, or to go to his imagination for his fac.s, than it is to the mere outsider. The evidence of a licensee may possibly be held to be tainted or affected by self-interest, but on the other hand, so is that of the police, and, to our thinking, the ordinary bench of magistrates attaches far too much weight to the evidence, often entirely without corroboration, of a policeman, and in cases where the evidence in favour of the publican is supported by outside and untainted evidence, far outweighing that of the police, the decision should follow the ordinary laws of evidence. Few people would willingly run the risk of a prosecution for perjury unless they had something very substantial to gain by.it, and it is easier for the police to punish perjury than for members of the public, who have neither the time nor the money to spend in bringing any offending members of the force to book. Our contention i s that the evidence of policeman and licensee being biassed, should be held to be equal, and no conviction should be recorded where there is a balance of evidence against the charge. A few dismissals would render the police a little more careful.

GAMBLING AND CLIMATE.

The bitter cry of the British spa may, the Meaicai Press thinks, assume a less piainuve note in the future if the present French Government adhere to their intention firmly to enforce their new antigambling law. “It has always been easily exp.icable on rational grounds why English people should prefer the Riviera and Algiers to their native wateringplaces in the winter, but it has been somewhat less obvious why they should spend their summer and autumn at many inconvenient, overcrowded, and not particulary salutary spas. The waters have been the ostensible excuse, but even the most scientific analysis have frequently failed to demonstrate that there is any overwhelming virtue in some of the springs that have contained calcium chloride or sodium sulphate in the similar proportions to those that bubble out of the bowels of the earth in England. The explanation in many cases, of course, is that roulette, baccarat, or petirs chevaux have been allowed as pastimes, and even the most gouty and hypochondriacal dyspeptic realises the difference in the degree of mental exhilaration derivable from those amusements and that drawn from the drawingroom ‘music’ or the wheezy orchestra of the British hydro. On moral grounds we must commend the latter, but on medical ones it is not a little questionable whether some patients might not be drawn out of themselves more by a course of ‘rouge-et-noir’ and ‘pair’ and ‘impair.’ However, the first attempts to suppress gambling in the pleasure resorts in France have been partly repulsed, and it may be the Government’s courage will ooze out of its finger-tips when it comes to a fight. If, however, gambling is fina'ly suppressed, hydro shares may rise.”

GERMAN BEER DRINKERS.

One. of the great Munich brasseries orfganised a beer-drinking contest a few days ago, which was the cause of some wonderful feats. The first prize was a silver cup. which was won by a man who dra.nk no- less than nine-and-'a-l quarter gallons of beer in three hours, while the second man drank nearly eight gallons, and the third a trifle of six-and-a-half.—Prosit.