MODEL LICENSE.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume XVIII, Issue 1053, 12 May 1910, Page 22

MODEL LICENSE.

THE METHOD OF TRUE REFORM. The following letter has (says a recent issue of “Fair Play”), been received by Mr. Edwin Stooke, secretary of the Liquor Trades Defence Union of N.S.W., from the president of the National Model License League and the United States of America. This league was formed and exists, growing more powerful every day, for the purpose of securing a better state of affairs in the licensed saloon business, of combating the excesses of prohibition, that tend only to induce breaches of the laws, and excess in the use of stimulants, while in no way really prohibiting the sale thereof; and of so regulating the trade, elevating and improving the conditions under which it is carried on, as to ultimately render all such stringent devices as no-license and prohibition impossible. The letter of the president of so wellmeaning, powerful, and wide-spread-ing an institution cannot fail to be valuable and of the greatest possible interest at this time: — National Model License League, Commercial Building, Louisville, Ky., March 10th, 1910. Edwin Stooke, Esq., Secretary, The Liquor Trades Defence Union of N.S.W., Sydney. Dear Sir, —Replying <to your esteemed favor of January 17th, beg to say that prohibition in this country has been experimented with seventy or eighty years, and it has proven'in every case a failure so far as interfering with the consumption dr with the abuse of alcoholic beverages is concerned.

Prohibition has destroyed hundreds •of millions of - revenue and many millions of. private ' pifoperty, but it does not prevent anyone’.from securing all the liquor that is desired-

Where the saloon is driven out, the mailorder house and the bootlegger mands of the consumers.

Maine has been under prohibition about seventy years, and she has as many retail liquor dealers as any and the moonshiner supply the deState in the Union, and she also has as large a per capita of paupers, divorces, drunkards, and the like, as any other State. Massachusetts has tried prohibi-J tion three times, and has repealed it; and it has been tried and given up in Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Ohio, and lowa, and it is now being tried in Oaklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina, and North Dakota. In all the States it is a complete failure, and in most of them the saloons are running wide open, and the authorities find it impossible to convict anybody. This is due to the fact that practically every man is violating the law either as a seller, buyer; or user. Very truly yours, (Signed) J. W. Gilmore, President National Model License League. Professor Dixon, lecturer in pharmacology at Cambridge, in an article in the last number of the “Nineteenth Century,” pronounces on the troubled question of whether alcohol is foodHe answers that question in the affirmative, it will be seen, and to the kindred query, whether it is a poison, votes no, but with a reservation based on a significant instance of the thyroid gland secretion, which is essential to the proper working of the body, though “undoubtedly a poison in excessive but not in normal amounts.” “To say that a free citizen shall have no liberty as to what he may drink, or what he may eat, or wherewith fie may be clothed, is rank and unjustifiable despotism which should have no Place among a free and enlightened population.”—New Orleans Picayune.

Congressman James was driving through a hilly section of Kentucky on a pleasure jaunt and, happening to notice a well beside a farm-house, pulled up and asked the farmer if he could give him a drink. “No, sah; as much as I wouldrlike to ’commodate you, sah, I can’t do a thing for you. But if you’ll pull in at Joneses’, ‘bout foh miles ahead, you can get somethin’, ” said the farmer. “But I thought I noticed a fine well here on your place?” said the big congressman. “Why, I didn’t know you wanted water. I thought you wanted a drink,” said the farmer, who Thereupon invited Marse James in to help himself from the iron bound bucket.