THE MARCH OF ORGANISATION.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, 3 October 1912, Page 26

THE MARCH OF ORGANISATION.

Every year shows a diminution in the statistics of drunkenness; every generation provides a fresh standard by which excess in alcohol is judged, says the “Sydney Morning Herald” in a recent thoughtful article under the above heading.

The article proceeds: “Early last century the political rulers of Britain were ‘tnree-bottle men,’ who thought it no disgrace to be taken home in a state of insensibility, and at ah eVen more recent date drunkenness was regarded as a minor peccadillo, which involved no serious consequences. Today all that has changed. Over-in-dulgence in this respect is considered a serious matter. The community has realised that it is incompatible with a man’s individual capacity to be a good citizen, and that if insobriety is a national characteristic it will interfere with a country’s capacity to play its proper part in the world. Public opinion has declared intemperance to be not a venial sin, but a mark of degeneration, which in these strenuous times cannot be tolerated. A hasty charge of this nature against teachers made at the last Farmers’ and Settlers’ Conference was repudiated with indignation from one end of the State to tlie other. PROHIBITION A FAILURE. “Public opinion is the great agent in temperance reform, and is probably the only one whose efforts are of much avail. It behoves those who wish to see an abstemious nation (and who does not?) to try to strengthen public opinion on this point. We have little faith in any of the panaceas that the zeal of well-intentioned doctrinaires has suggested. Prohibition has oeen tried in various parts of the world, yet nowhere has its experience shown that the evil it seeks to combat has been appreciably diminished. On the contrary, it has sometimes shown that the same evil, or others as bad, have been aggravated. At best such remedies and others of the kind are but artificial, and presuppose an ineradicable tendencv in mankind, which can only be counteracted by such expedients. On the other

nand, to educate men and women, to bring them from childhood to see that excess in alcohol is a deadly handicap in the battle of life, and a rertile cause of misery to themselves and others, in fact to develop a strong public opinion un the subject, is the natural and probably the only effective course. CURATIVE MEASURES. •’Other methods may help on this blessed consummation, but they are at best temporary in their nature and inadequate. In the meantime there remains much to be done for those whom science now has shown to be diseased rather than criminal. Every day we hear of cases where some unfortunate is convicted for the hundredth time upon a charge of drunkenness, and every day we hear the magistrates complain that there is no satisfactory method of dealing with such cases. There are various provisions under which offenders of this class can be confined in gaol for an indeterminate period, but there is ; no public hospital . where inebriates receive medical, as distinct from punitive.. treatment. This is a matter for which advocates, of temperance reform should strive, for in it lies a rational and humane solution of part 1 of the problem.” :