WHAT IS TRUE TEMPERANCE?

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume XVIII, Issue 1034, 30 December 1909, Page 22

WHAT IS TRUE TEMPERANCE?

Mr. Arthur Brisbane, the £lO,OOO, a year editor of the “Chicago American,” is the author of the following interesting article:- — “ A problem present in almost every family, vitally important in every city and State, is the temperance problem. “ Drunkenness is a curse, a vice, and a disease. It has caused more suffering in the world—mental suffering—than any of our scourges—not even war excepted. “ The fight against drunkenness has gone on for centuries. It is still on. Luckily, we can say that progress has been steady. There is. infinitely less drunkenness to-day than there was in former days. The world has become more temperate, and will continue to grow temperate. “ What is true temperance? It is as far from prohibition as it is from drunkenness. The drunkard is restless of the feelings of others. With the mania for drink upon him, he forgets the needs of his family and his own duty and honor. “ The prohibitionist is as intemperate in his ways as the drunkard, and he acts as unwisely. Temperance, has not increased because of the work of the prohibitionist, but in spite of it. '

“ The man who drinks too much and who can become a total abstainer is fortunate. Some do that of their own free will —but not all the prohibitionists in the world could force it upon them. “ The prohibitionist feels that he has a right to compel the majority to agree with him. He succeeds sometimes in driving out of use the drinks that are really temperate, the light wines and the beers. “ Prohibition emphasises and intensifies drunkenness, it never cures. In a prohibition state you may see a working man lying beside the road dead drunk, stupefied, pockets empty, and a whisky bottle lying empty beside him also. This is the sort of thing you see in prohibition territory. You see it in New Jersey on a Sunday, in Maine, in Kansas. The sight is familiar to everybody who has travelled in a prohibition state. “ Compare that miserable drunkard, the victim of prohibition, with the working man in Germany on Sunday, or any other day, taking his glass of beer, or the working man in France taking his glass of wine,

temperately, with his family, and unmolested! i “This question of temperance has got to be fought out in this country and settled along lines of common sense. Those who discuss it and deal with it must know their subject. The fact that a man or a woman has had a son turn out a drunkard does not by any means indicate the man’s or woman’s right or capacity for making laws to regulate tne drink traffic. On the contrary, the man whose son has turned out a drunkard has before him the living evidence of the fact that he (the father),does not understand the drink question. Let the prohibitionists ask themselves how many of the most hopeless young drunkards in the early twenties are the sons of prohibition fathers, boys that were brought up under the strict intemperate law of prohibition? Boys that if they drank in secret —boys that became drunkards as soon as they had a chance. It is the same in prohibition families as in prohibition states, and statistics prove it. “ Prohibition compels secret drinking, and it results in excessive drinking, when the prohibition becomes ineffective. “There is more downright, vile drunkenness in one single prohibition state in America than in the whole of Germany with its millions of population. “ Prohibition is a failure and always will be, for tyranny fails.”