AN UNBIASSED VIEW.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume XVI, Issue 943, 2 April 1908, Page 20

AN UNBIASSED VIEW.

A word in season to the fanatical extremists whose aim is prohibition and the spoliation of the publican. The “Spectator” (London) says:—“We have never been able to agree with the fanatics for teetotalism, holding that they habitually ignore some of the most important facts in the whole question. The fact, for example, that Christ not only drank wine, but ordered His disciples to drink it in memory of Him. is for all Christians a proof that the taking of alcohol is not a thing prohibited as malum in se; while the other fact, that the world has not only been conquered but moralised by the drinking races, is unanswerable evidence that the consumption of intoxicants is not fatal either to the energy of a race or its capacity for rising to the h : ghest intellectual levels. We owe art to the Greek, monotheism to the Hebrew, law to the Roman, and libertv to the Teuton, and each of these four races has habitually consumed alcohol as a usual article of diet, while two of them —the Roman and Teuton —showed for ages a disposition to use it in excess. It is the creed which denounces alcohol that has been the enemy of civilisation, and whose votaries have displayed in the highest degree the vices which the consumption of alcohol is supposed to foster, or, in the belief of many worthy people, even to produce. . . Total prohibition is impossible

i' T- j _ while every man with a tea, kettle and a tin pipe can distil a kind of spirit from corn, potatoes, or inferior wine.”