LOOK UP! FAINT HEARTS.

White Ribbon, Volume 27, Issue 317, 18 November 1921, Page 1

LOOK UP! FAINT HEARTS.

Do Temperance people rxally appreciate the tremendous strides nuule by their cause during thj last fifty or sixty years? We hear, perhaps too often, the despairing cry that the Kmpi re is being throttled by the drink traffic, and too little of the ever increasing volume ol' public opinion against drink. We forget also the successful tackling of the monster traffic that is taking place all over the world. The whole attitude of the nations is changing towards the drink evil. Britain may lag liehind, but the change in her attitude towards drink is marvellous. For example, 1 had a fine old friend at home, in my early days, Mr Robert Rae, Secretary of the National Temperance League. He was speaking, shortly before his death, at a great Temperance Convention in Scotland. He was on a platform surrounded by clergymen, doctors. professors, and other great people, and in his speech he recalled his first visit to Dundee forty years before, and he said it would then have been a very serious matter for a minister of the Presbyterian Church to have accomj>anied him to the platform and ranged himself alongside a T emperance advocate. To-day how different it is! A Presbyterian minister who was not a Temperance advocate would be a rarity, and clergymen of every denomination vie wdth each other in the advocacy of Temperance and doing honour to the Temperance worker. And even the politician nowadays poses as a Temperance advocate! He may be s.trong against Prohibition, he

may oven be a brewer or distiller; but if he means to get into Parliament he must suggest some remedy for drunkenness. It is doubtless a useless scheme that he has to propose, but the fact that he finds it necessary to pose as a Temperance reformer shows how far public opinion has advanced in the right direction. Then look at the immense change for good in our social customs to-day. both among our working men and the upper classes! Look at the great strides made by temperance in the ordinary family. A young married couple who had the decanter and spirits always in evidence would nowadays b(* comparatively rare. If a temperance advocate nowadays stumbles into a house where drink is on the table, the one time sneer at total abstinence is suppressed, and instead, he hears a half-asham* d apology for drink being there. Then, oven among people who sneer at abstainers as bigots, you will find the acknowledgment that drink is bad for the young folk, and if there is one thing more than another that is grieving the whole body of thinking people it is the drinking among our young folk at the present time. The liquorsellers themselves deplore this (and 1 believe many of them deplore it sincerely), and yet in early Victorian days ale and beer w*ere on the dinner table of all the boys’ schools in England. 1 myself have seen a programme of a country fete at the coronation of Queen Victoria, when all the little village children sat down to a school feast, and a mug of beer was th* only drink supplied to the little ones! I was read

ing a few days ago some icioiniscenccs of the late W. S. Caine, a Temperance M.P. in England. He said that sixty years ago, in Liverpool, no less than 126 public-houses surrounded the Exchange (there are now fifteen), and no sale could then be effected between one cotton broker and another without drink. The older numbers ol Unions will remember much the same thing in New Zealand. Drinking goes on yet over sales, but nothing like to the extent it did fortty years ago. And what decent town would put up with the drunken brawls that used to be the ordar of the day outside the hotels and in the streets forty or fifty years ago. R is the quickening of the conscience and the sensitising of the heart of the people that shows us the progress we have made. The old selfish ideas are dying, and people are being moved at the sight of the fearful suffering caused through drink. Also people are recognising that the waste of man power and the loss of efficiency, and a new surface is being prepared for the Temperance Truth in all its fullness and entirety. And on that prepared and sensitised conscience of the nation we must sow Temperance Truths with all diligence. We must, with deep-rooted conviction, and genuine abandon to what is right, strive to inspire others with the same hatred to strong drink that we possess ourselves, and so inspire them, that they shall enlist in the crusade against the great destroyer. But what we want, perhaps more than anything, is an earnest, deep rooted conviction that our cause Is prosper ing, that wc are winning in the fight.

America has gained the victory, and so .shill we! Such a conviction in our hearts will be infectious, and we shall gain adherent after adherent, and hasten the day of victory, which is surely coming, not only to this fair I>ominion, but to the beloved Homeland and to all the world. MARY G. BIBBY.