BEER, AJS T D THE TEMPERANCE PROBLEM. 



257 



pass away with them. A country newly occupied 

 by white settlers is neither romantic nor pictu- 

 resque when the primeval forest has been reduced 

 to charred stumps, and a long interval must elapse 

 before the undefaced glories of the wilderness 

 can be replaced by the cultivated beauty of an 

 old and prosperous land. In time the fern-land 

 and bush of New Zealand will be converted into 

 a populous and productive country ; but the peo- 

 ple and the products will be English, and not 

 Maori. Thus the world becomes more prosperous 

 and wealthy, but less interesting and varied, and 

 the inducements to travel diminish as the facilities 

 increase. Even in older countries the variety of 



scenery, of architecture, of costume, of social and 

 political institutions, of fauna and flora, so charm- 

 ing at the present moment, is tending to become 

 a thing of the past, and will be vainly sought for 

 by the travelers of another generation. An East- 

 ern dragoman once said to me, while we were 

 gazing in admiration at a crumbling Saracenic 

 edifice, "We see these things, but our sons will 

 not be able to see them." The feeling to which 

 his words gave expression was constantly in my 

 mind when among the Maoris and Kanakas, whose 

 "teuakoe" and "aloha," their friendly greetings 

 to the passing stanger, have all the pathos of an 

 eternal adieu. — Fortnightly Review. 



BEER, AND THE TEMPERANCE PROBLEM. 



By CHARLES GRAHAM. 



THE magnitude of the consumption of beer 

 and spirits by our laboring-classes, and the 

 great and certainly not diminishing abuse of these 

 alcoholic stimulants, combine to render the sub- 

 ject of the following article one of deep interest 

 to all anxious to combat a wide-spread and in- 

 creasing source of injury to the public welfare. 

 Though the majority of the nation is opposed to 

 the views of Sir Wilfrid Lawson and others of his 

 school, yet all must feel deeply concerned at con- 

 templating the vast sums of money spent by the 

 nation on beer and spirits, and the great amount 

 of misery and crime caused by the excessive use 

 of these beverages. The records of our criminal 

 courts, the oft-expressed statements of our judges 

 and magistrates, the opinions of medical authori- 

 ties, indeed the experience of all, testify to this 

 great and growing evil. 



Hence the efforts, for many years past, of those 

 who would, if they could, prohibit the use of all 

 alcoholic beverages so as to get rid of the evils 

 arising from the abuse of them. Our recent leg- 

 islation, though conceived in a spirit contrary to 

 the views of the Alliance party, has yet assumed 

 that the evil might be lessened by limiting the 

 number of public-houses ; a process ineffectual 

 for the purpose of reducing the consumption, and 

 fraught with danger, because it is building up 

 a gigantic monopoly, which year by year will 

 root itself deeper, until at last its abrogation by 

 the substitution of a better system will cost the 

 nation many millions in compensation to the 



17 



trade. The supporters of the Liverpool experi- 

 ment mav at least claim for it the merit of being 

 in accord with free-trade principles, and that 

 under such a system it would be impossible for a 

 vast monopoly to grow up to bar the way to fu- 

 ture legislation. 



All attempts, however, to reduce or to abol- 

 ish the consumption of the so-called intoxicating 

 beverages, whether conceived in the spirit of Mr. 

 Chamberlain's enthusiastic attempt to introduce 

 a modification of the Gothenburg system, or in 

 that of the Permissive Bill party, are based on 

 insufficient knowledge not only of the articles 

 consumed but also of the consumers. They can- 

 not, or will not, distinguish between good and 

 bad products ; nor between use and abuse — in- 

 deed, they hold the one to be the necessary con- 

 sequence of the other ; and, lastly, they utterly 

 ignore, with the willful blindness common to the 

 holders of extreme views, the chief cause of the 

 excessive consumption of alcoholic liquids. 



Hence their efforts are doomed, in the future 

 as in the past, to failure ; or, if they are appar- 

 ently successful, as in Maine, secret and illicit 

 drinking, with all its vices of law-breaking, de- 

 ceit, and hypocrisy, will replace the present 

 drinking system, which, bad though it be, has at 

 least the merits of being open and legal. 



Though opposed to all such propositions as 

 being an unjustifiable interference with the lib- 

 erty of the subject, and as being utterly worth- 

 less as a remedy for the disease, one must jet 



