FAILURE OF PROHIBITION.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume XVIII, Issue 1060, 30 June 1910, Page 21

FAILURE OF PROHIBITION.

“More people are killed by bad food and bad cooking than by alcohol,” said Dr. Frederick Bell at Mosman in the course of an address on license or no-license. “For 60 years prohibition has been tried In many different sections of the United States of America, and under diverse social conditions. By what it had done and by what it had not done it must be judged.” Prohibition, he added, could be explained in three words—failure, folly, farce—at least, that was his experience, and it was only from personal experience he spoke. Statis-? tics were unreliable. Nowhere and at no time had prohibition accomplished a single one of its avowed objects, nowhere had it abolished the liquor traffic or lessened the evils of intemperance. In America as a State-wide system it had made no contribution to the solution of the liquor problem; it had merely shown the folly of attempting by legislation to make men virtuous. Seveji of the eight States in America that years ago adopted the system had since abandoned it and returned to a system of license and regulation. Three years ago when he left America, there were eight States in which statutory prohibition obtained under the local option system, and a number of other States had been prohibitionised under the instalment plan. Even in the State of Mains, where prohibition was retained, there were unmistakable signs of genuine repentance It wasi generally the least popular where best known, as it was shown that the consumption of liquor increased with prohibition.

He advocated temperance, by which he meant the habitual moderation of the appetites and passions, and the proper control of the liquor traffic. He concluded with the statement that more people were killed by bad food and bad cooking than by alcohol. Mr. Dooley had said that all prohibition had been able to do was to “Make whisky dear, hard to get, and bad when you got it.”