Australasia's Thirst

New Zealand Tablet, 23 August 1906, Page 9

Australasia's Thirst

The art and craft of diawing up dimk statistics, was unknown ill Addison's day. Each man kept Ins own record, 'if so di.spoged '—like ' honest Will Funuell of the West, Saxon,' who in the course of twenty thirsty years had (according to his own computation) personally disposed of 23 hogsheads of October, four tuns of port, half a kildeikin of small beer, 29 barrels of cider, three glasses of champagne, besides (accoidmg to Addison) numberless bowls of punch, sips, diams, and whets. We cannot boast nowadays ; but we have got a long way off in manners, as in time, fiom the loystenng and whisky-swiliing eia of Will Funnell and his kind. Nowadays the statist keeps- the tally of the nation's small beer and ' pumli, sips, diams, and whets,' and he strikes off individual scores by the convenient lesort ol an aveiage. And the result cannot be said to make veiy pleasant leading. Ucie aie the latest iigures for the six Stales of Australia, with New Zealand added as a tag .—. —

The order of tempeiance, based upon per capita consumption, inns as follows: Tasmania, New Zealand, Victoria, South Aus'tiaha, Western Australia. • Germany's huge thirst takes over fifty per cent. more alcoholic assuaging than New Zealand's and slightly "more than Australia's. Its annual liquor-till amounts to £131,517,600. And (says the United States consul at Kiel in a recent report) ' according to published statistics, each inhabitant consumed yeaily €£ quarts of wine, 12!U quarts of beei, and 9 quarts of brandy. The per capita cost was £2 ss, including women and children. The average fur male citizens over fifteen years would be £7 10s.' (American dollars aid here turned into the corresponding amounts in English currency). Bismarck is stated to have declared that ' Germany is ruined by the beer plague '. And Germans at home of every position do undoubtedly spend an unconscionable time in the thick, smoky atmosphere oE their beer-houses, of which the number and the patronage almost surpass belief. Nor can we in New Zealand afford to boast in this matter

of temperance, despite the position that we hold among the Australasian Stales. Our enormous advantage in the: matter of climate and water-supply should, "by itself alone, make us rate much higher as a temperate people than our neighbors that dwell in the hot, dry, and thirsty lands heyond the Tasman Sea. Yet the road to ruin is pretty nearly as well paved, here as in Australia. We have an unpleasant percentage of people who (like Artemus Ward) never permit business to interfere with their di ink ing, and who 1 Get on a spree And go bobbing aiound '. * Among our licensed victuallers theie are, we know, very many who conduct what is a veiy risky and responsible business, in a respectable and legal way. But there hangs on to the skills of 'the trade 1 a bedraggled fringe of scallywags who systematically set the laws of God and man at defiance , who fatten on the physical and moral degradation that they encourage ; and who with a light heai I send so;,ls to the fieiy whirlpool and the bottomless pit— .so long as the diabolical game piles the guilty shekels in their fob. They are the leal originat&is and (he most, eloquent leaders of the Prohibition movement, and not the men wlio rightly denounce them as destroyers, and who wrongly assume that all in the same bu.siness aie taired with the same number of coats by the same rod-devil's brush. The law, as it stands, us by no means sufficiently drastic 1o deal effectively with the licensed malefactor who gratifies his rapacity at the expons-e of tlie moral code and the public weal. All too often, the sword of justice fails to touch him, just as the sword of Aeneas failed to wound the impalpable shadows of the dead. that flitted before his vision. But the law can be made to reach 1 hem— by the double way of prevention and of cuie: of pi event ion, by nailing the access oE Ihe undesirable to ' the tiade', and of ciuc, by ejecting him (if he secuiis an entiy) with commendable neatness and despatch. We have moie than once indicated how this may be done. And we have full many a time urged, and still mge, the licensed victuallers as a. body to press foi such legislation as shall permanently eliminate the scallywag and the reprobate from the trade \ But tins uigent mo\e in an urgent reform is, like Piime Chailic, ' lang a-comiti I .' Ludwig Bueine avcis that the typical Fat hei lander will wear his> coat thieadbuie Avhile making up his mind whether; or not he will have a new button sewn upon it. 'Eile mit Weile ' is his motto—' make haste m a leisurely way '. But when a itfoim is uigently needed in the public inteiest, ' the pit-sent time is . the pleasant time. It vwis the love and the tii/ler who sang lung ago. 'To the gods belongs to-moiiow'.

only £400 ! Well—' fond of lawsuits, little wealth. 1 There is no straii-jackel big enough to enclose "a good-sized village community. And the lawyers of Luceran and Lanconque may well join in Pudd'nhead Wilson's vesper hymn to the joltheads and the lackwits : ' Let us be thankful for the fools ; \mt for them the rest of the world couldn't succeed.' We have records of other historic cases galore in which (as ' Hudibras ' hath it) unwise litigants * Are catch'd in knotted law, like nets, la which, when once they are imbrangled, The more they stir, the more they're, tangled ; - And while their purses can dispute, There's no end of immortal suit.' To the English-speaking public the most familiar instance of the ' law's delays./ is that of Parkes v. Dawkins— immortalised by Dickens as the ' Jarndyce v. Jarndyce ' case in ' Bleak House . ,It dragged its weary length along from 1823 (when Parker, the wealthy West Indian planter died) till 1869. Ami then it was abandoned simply because the lawyers had sucked the last drop of golden syrup out of the estate, and there were no longer funds to fight with— or about. We have an impression that the long Parker-Daw-kins trial gave rise to Loid Brougham's definition of a lawyer as ' a gentleman who rescues your estate fiom your enemies and keeps it for himself.' He lived almost to see the close of the case. As late as IS!M Mr. Justice Chitty decided in an English court the Ashton-Mumpcsson case, after it had gone monotonously on for 150 yeais. The C'ascalo-Depic suit about a small field in Barcelona (Spain) has g-iven profitable exercise to the jawbones of generations of lawyers since 1697. The litigation between the Lords of Thunen (Bavaria) and the town of Unteifiaken— all about an oak and beech forest— began in 1596. It did not cease to drag its vveaiy length through the courts till 1896 — exactly three hundred yeais. Spain's record lawsuit (a pension dispute between the Marquises de Viana and the Counts Torres de CabreLa) has been clacking its long tongue in the courts since 1517. It is clacking jslill . And four centuries of lawyers and ofiiciaJs have prevented the amounts involved (which otherwise would have run into some millions sterling) from ever becoming unwieldy. There were two Fiench cases (over pasture-rights) that wagged their chins before geneiations of judges for 638 yeais before they were decided. One of them (begun by the Comte de Neveis again.st the town of Dou/iy in 1210) did not end till 1818. In the other case (which opened between the towns of Cambon and Bagneies in 1251) a tardy verdict was arrived at in 1892. In every case the interests involved wcie worth only an insignificant fraction of the sums spent in litigation. How true it is that (as the ancient proverb hath it), • fools and obstinate men make lawyeis lich:' ! Billings probably had litigious bull-heads mot>t in his mind's eye when he penned this ' afierism ' : ' God save the phools J and don't let them run out, for if it wern't for them, wise men couldn't get a livinV

r iotoria few South Wales )ueeneland ... louth Australia Veßtera Australia Tasmania Aniuunt. £ ... 4,937,4 70 ... 5 044,590 ... 1,869,470 ... 1,550,210 ... 1,44:6,110 419,490 Per Head. £ * d. 4 2 0 3 12 2 3 13 4 4 5 9 7 1 5 2 7 7 Individual. ■£, s. d. "7 11 3 6 19 7 7 1 2 S 7 5 11 7 0 i 15 I Australia ... ... 15,267,340 3 19 2 7 9 7 New Zealand ... 2,239,290 2 13 1 4 19 1