HERE AND THERE.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Issue 1154, 23 May 1912, Page 20

HERE AND THERE.

Mi- E. Tattersall, proprietor of the Hoyal Hotel, Christchurch, has disposed of his interest therein, and after eight years close attention to business, means to enjoy a well-earned rest.

The Wairongomai Hotel is being dismantled and is to be re-erected in l’e Aroha as a boardinghouse.

Mr C. Potts, proprietor of the Coronation Hotel, Eltham, has numerous friends amongst tourists and travellers. He is always pleased to see old faces and welcome new ones, while the hotel appointments are of the best.

At Masterton on Friday, two young men, Albert Duske and Lionel McCarthy were fined £2O and £lO respectively for keeping liquor for sale within that no-license district.

Mr J. K. Shaw, late licensee of the Pakarae hotel, who is leaving for a trip round the world, was farewelled by a number of his friends at the Masonic hotel, Gisborne,- last week. The Mayor, (Mr W. Pettid) presided over the gathering, and on behalf of his many friends presented Mr Shaw with a valuable dressing case, and a New Zealand rug for Mrs Shaw.

At the annual conference of the United Commercial Travellers’ Association of Australasia, held in Launceston during Easter week, Mr D. M’Pherson (representing New Zealand) said that in Invercargill they were at the present time building a gigantic temperance hotel, and the travellers were waiting with great interest to see how successful or otherwise that enterprise was going to be. There was no question that the accommodation for the travelling public, as soon as they started cutting down licenses, suffered.. Even in Dunedin, at exceptional times, people had been known to have to walk about the streets, unable to obtain shelter, either in hotels or boardinghouses. They had, absolutely, to walk about the streets. The Temperance party, or those who were endeavouring to carry Prohibition,

were not in any way making any provision for the traveil.ng public on account of the houses they were shutting up. - J V Cjt VisLors to Eltham can be assured of having their wants supplied at the Central Hotel, which is under the able direction of Mr Geo. W. Tayler. The accommodation is fizst-c’ass, and always meets with the entire satisfaction of the travelling public.

At Taumarunui on Tuesday, a man named Kelly was fined £25 and costs on each of two cases of selling whisky to natives, with an alternative of three months’ imprisonment in each case. Kelly was also sentenced to one month’s imprisonment on a charge of theft under peculiar circumstances, which caused a legal argument. He offered a bottle of whisky to a native for £l, but the latter refused to give more than 15s, which Kelly accepted, but when the Maori gave him a pound note he refused to give change. The Maori then informed the police. Defendant’s counsel argued that the refusal to give change did not constitute

theft. The magistrate, Mr F. O’B. Loughnan, ru.ed that it came under the general definition of theft, and could hot be regarded as merely a breach of contract.

A statement made by Mr G. H. Cullen in connection with a sly grog case in Masterton, speaks for itself. “There are places in this town,” he. said, “where liquor. is being sold today as openly as it was in the days of the. public bar, and it would suit the police, better to give attention tothese individuals who are making a good thing out of the business, instead of choosing sound hard-working young men who are not sealing liquor.”

A case of a very uncommon nature was ventilated at the Magistrate’s Court, Wanganui, the other day, when a husband sued his wife for maintenance. The plaintiff in his day had been one of the best-known professional riders “over the sticks” in New Zealand, and, in the words of his counsel, had had more bones broken than any man in the Dominion, and as a result was in very poor health. After he had married he made over his property at Feilding to his wife, and she later mortgaged it to finance

him in an hotel at Levin, the license tor;which he had to transfer .to his wite, ana as she was now evidently “lord and master” he asked the court to make an order for his wife to support him. After hearing a considerable amount of evidence the case was dismissed.

A recent Australian visitor to New Zealand has given his impressions on the liquor question in these words: —

"With the women’s votes, prohibition seems inevitable, and probably the sooner the whole wretched business is brought to an absolute critical issue, the better. The result of closing at 10 instead of 11 p.m. is that many are made disreputable who would otherwise be temperate citizens. From my own personal observation I declare that there is four times as much drinking done between nine and 10 p.m. in New Zealand by the individual nowadays than in the times when the hotels were open till 11.30 and midnight. The tossing down of drink during the last quarter of an hour in some places is something appalling. Why has the drinking of wine not been cultivated in New Zealand There would be some sense in that. In the whole of New Zealand there is one wine-shop, and it is located in an Auckland suburb.”

The dispute whether New Zealand is growing more sober or is looking with greater fondness on the bottle rages furiously year by year; on the other hand there is the president of the Alliance, and on the other the chairman of. the Liquor Trade Asociation. For the most part the argument proceeds by statistics, and the numbers of gallons of whisky sold in each twelve months are eagerly examined and tabulated by both sides. The prohibitionists assert that the money spent on snake-juice and similar products in 1911 was less by 6% cl per head than that which was spent in 1910. This is an event of huge significance. If the 6%. d had been the other way the anti-prohibitionists would be as joyous as they are now gloomy. To us, however, this 6%d seems to imply no more than one hot day, or an extra smoke night of the Caledonian Society in Dunedin. Six-pence-three-farthings is not much more than one drink. The average man cannot regard it as of extreme importance. Which of us would ever say: Tn 1911 I was sober and righteous, for I had one drink less than in 1910; if my total in 1912 exceeds that of 1911 by one, then J shall think' myself drunken and depraved?” Yet that is the way the statistical arguments of the platform go.

IN PRAISE OF ALCOHOL.

Alcohol, among civilised white men, is the father and mother of joy—of

innocent joy as well as suicidal joy. If it shortens life it also glorifies life. Against every man that it kills one may set 10,000 men that it makes happy. Against every home that it blasts one may set 10,000 homes that it mellows, pacifies, and illumines with romance. Father, charged with a pair of cocktails, may be a foe to his stomach and his arteries, but he is certainly no foe to his young children, for he gives them 10 cents apiece and bids them be merry. The son of the house, inflamed with a highball, may show a congested nose, but blood is also flooding his heart,- for doesn’t he wait on his best girl, clasp her to his bosom’, kiss her like a man, and engage himself to her in honourable marriage? What would become of romance if there were no alcohol? asks the “Baltimore Sun.” Imagine a teetotaler writing “Much Ado About Nothing,” or the Fifth Symphony, or “Le Malade Imaginaire,” or “Peer Gynt,” or the Zend-Avesta, or the Declaration of Independence, or any other great work of feeling and fancy! Imagine Wagner, bursting with ginger pop, at work upon “Tristan und Isolde.” Imagine Leonardo, soaked in health drinks from Battle Creek, fashioning the unfathomable smile of Mona Lisa! Baxter, who wrote “The Saint’s Everlasting Rest,” was a “dry.” Well; read his book —and then say why! But great races, it may be urged, have pegged along without alcohol. Yes, but not without some other stimulant, some other poison. The Chinese lean to opium, the Malays to the betel nut, the Hindus to hasheesh, the Puritans drank blood. But the Turks — what of them? Well, let the Turks come into court. They have no drama, no music, no poetry, no paint-

ing. They are strangers to romantic x love. Not since the days of old Omar has the Arabic stock produced a first-class artist or a first-class man •—and in Omar’s time, as readers of the Rubaiyat are well aware, the grapevine, in Islam, was more than an ornamental shrub. A poison? Certa’nly. But so are all other things that lift a man out of h’mself and make him soar and give him temporary forgetfulness of his wife’s lack of beauty, his bank account’s anaemia and his own ungraceful figure, growing baldness and bad digestion.

THIRSTY TERRITORIALS. (THINGS ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM. In the letter which the Christchurch Prohibition League forwarded to Major-General Godley, referring to drinking in camps, it was stated that schoolboys had said that they had collected beer bottles at the camping ground at Templeton. A territorial who attended the camp, when speaking to a Christchurch Press reporter, explained the reason for the presence of the bottles, which it was alleged had contained beer. “It is perfectly true,” he said, “that each morning before the lines were cleared beer bottles could be seen scattered about’ in plenty, and to any busybodies who’ were .Ibok'ng for evidence against us this would seem certain proof of our. guilt. If, however, they had troubled to make the slightest Investigation they would have ha-d their theory exploded, for the offensive looking bottles contained nothing stronger than lemonade. The firm who had the canteen contract for the camp evidently thought that the usual small bottle of lemonade would prove inadequate for the thirsty territorial-, so they hit on the plan of putting “soft” drinks up in bottles exactly similar to the quart beer bottles. When a bottle was finished’ it was usually thrown down the lines and next morning, when the daily cleaning up was done, all the bottles would be consigned to a rubbish tip, where no doubt they were found by the enterprising schoolboys who saw in them articles for trade.”