THE “NO LICENSE” SLUMP.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Issue 1138, 1 February 1912, Page 20

THE “NO LICENSE” SLUMP.

ALLIANCE .MEMBER’S “IMPRESSIONS” OF THE RECENT POLL. “ACCORDING TO COCKER.” /' “impressions” of the recent licensing polls appear in the latest issue of “The Vanguard,” the official organ oi the New Zealand Alliance. They are -all of a more or less diverting character. The Rev. J. Cocker, for instance, writes up the Auckland situation and makes more than one. significant admission. “According to Cocker” (not the legal but the clerical gentleman), the liquor party was better organised, spent money more freely, and generally speaking were more on the alert than the Prohibitionists. Allegedly> also, they were more .unscrupulous, more abusive, and more persistent in their attempts to besmirch the character of their opponents and to obscure the issues than Mr. Cocker and his friends. In asking us to believe all this, the gentleman named Cocker trades upon the known credulity of the average man. Incidentally, also, he does injustice to his own side and even to himself, for who could match the organising powers of the New Zealand Alliance, with its nolicense councils and paid organisers in every electorate; Its demonstrations and appeals to what is termed “the public conscience,” and the wealth of invective, abuse and calumny poured out upon the liquor party by the Prohibitionist orators. Mr. Cocker cannot be ignorant of these things, yet he poses as the most veritable of all innocents. He is indeed the innocent abroad —very much so. * * * WHAT CAUSED THE CHANGE? Says Mr. Cocker, speaking of the situation in Auckland: “Until about a fortnight before the poll we were very hopeful of a great victory, but the atmosphere changed —and atmosphere has much to do in winning an election. The change could be felt better than explained*. Had the poll been taken a fortnight earlier we should have done much better!” Just why and how the reverend gentleman arrives at that conclusion is left to conjecture. It is just possible that his friends and himself overshot the mark by speaking too long and too often. The very virulence of their methods may have confounded them. Although he pays tribute to the organisation of the liquor party he admits that “only one public meeting” was held on its behalf, and he adds “comparatively little was done by them in the way of advertising in the daily papers.” On the other hand the daily papers contained abundant evidence that the Prohibitionists, and notably the Band of Business Men —“the Wowser Company, Unlimited, Fully Paid Up,” as they styled themselves —spent money like water in the attempt to carry both No-license and Prohibition. But Mr. Cocker finds his chief grievance

in the use of the term “wowser” by the Liquor party. He and his frieu.. have been termed “wowsers,” and far irom glorying in it as the Band of Business men ana certain of his Alliance colleagues have done, he ascribes tfie misfortunes of his party to its use. The word “wowser” is, he says, “taken from the gutter and combines the bark of a dog and the hiss of a serpent.” It enabled the liquor party (according to Mr. Cocker) to “express their venom and hatred of good people by hurling this offensive term at them. In combination with petrol and pink ribbon it brought about the No-license slump. Really, we are sorry for “the good people”—and Mr. Cocker. How deplorable to think that the unhallowed use of motor cars, the wearing of pink ribbon, and the use of the word “wowser” should have effected such havoc in the ranks of the nolicense party. * # # THE BARE MAJORITY. iur. Cocker sees no possibility oi carrying Prohibition for many years to come, unless the three-fifths handicap is removed. “We must,” he says, with a sublimely insolent disregard of the crooked work of his own colleagues in setting on one side the compact to which they had pledged themselves, “have me majority reduced. To secure a three-fifths majority for the Dominion poll, though we had a majority of 53,0 00 or more, we still required another 45,000 to reach the three-fifths majority. . . There are many who have a keen disappointment that the “compromise” did not become part of the licensing law. We shall now have to fight to secure those advantages which were placed within our reach by the compact”! And the reverend gentleman is apparently wholly unconscious of the dishonesty of the proposals he makes. “We must fight,” he says in effect, “to secure advantages which our opponents were ready to concede to us in return for concessions which we, through our representatives, agreed to make to them, ana we must insist upon obtaining them and other far reaching advantages, without making the slightest concession in return. Behind the advice we seem to hear the wail of disappointment, “Why, oh why’ did we turn that compact down?” The fifty-five sixtieths would certainly have increased the number of dry areas in New Zealand, and just as certainly it would have made the Prohibition vote more effective. But Mr. Cocker and his colleagues rejected, and substituted for it the “No-Yes” vote that enabled the electors to vote Continuance on the one hand and National Prohibition on the other. The position is truly a tantalising one. The only comfort —and it is cold comfort at that —Mr. Cocker is able to get out of the situation is reflected in his opinion that “the voters are not satisfied to deal with the liquor traffic piecemeal, but mean to drive it out of the country,’’ an opinion that takes a deal too much for granted.

A petition has been filed by over 50 Maori electors in the Horou Maori Council district regarding the validity of the recent Iquor poll, when the voting was in favour of liquor being supplied to natives. The principal grounds on which the petitioners base their objections to the poll are that the polling place at Hick’s Bay was never opened on the day of the poll, and a large number of electors were in consequence debarred from exercising their votes; also, that the polling place at Maraenui was closed at three p.m„ thus shutting out a number of voters. There are also one or two legal questions. An objection is raised that a majority of the electors who were qualified to vote did not carry the proposal that liquor should not be supplied to natives in the Horou Maori Council district; and that a recommendation by the Maori Council to the Governor to proclaim the district was not a valid recommendation.