PRACTICAL PROBLEMS 343 



than one instance this led to the woman of the household 

 cultivating a taste for liquor, with the inevitable result that 

 secret dram-drinking led to the downfall of women who would 

 never otherwise have known the taste of liquor. Secret rooms 

 were fitted up as bars, where every kind of liquor was dis- 

 pensed, and in some of these shocking scenes were witnessed. 

 Meantime the business of the township suffered, as travellers 

 were compelled to pass on to neighbouring towns to obtain 

 accommodation. Visitors who had been in the habit of spend- 

 ing a few weeks in the bush for health's sake were prevented 

 from the same reason from sojourning in the district. 

 Drunkenness and debauchery increased, and, so soon as the 

 prescribed period of Prohibition had passed, the people voted 

 to re-open the hotels. The Clutha people are passing through 

 a similar experience ; the stipendiary magistrate of the district 

 has deemed it his duty to report to the Government that sly 

 grog-selling, drunkenness and debauchery, lying, sneaking, 

 and spying had succeeded where the people had previously 

 been law-abiding and decent. It will be long before regula- 

 tion will once more hold sway, because not only have the 

 promises made in the name of Prohibition not been kept 

 they have been proved to be utterly fallacious. Injury has 

 been done where benefit was predicted, and immorality has 

 succeeded to decency of behaviour. As Principal Grant of 

 Canada recently declared, it would be better to return to the 

 drinking customs of thirty years ago than that the degrada- 

 tion existent in Maine should come as a result of so-called 

 Prohibition/' 1 



531. Probably of all modern repressive measures the 

 Gothenburg System has afforded the best results. Formerly 

 the laws and social customs of Sweden and Norway seemed 

 almost as if purposely designed to create in a population 

 that had undergone only a limited amount of evolution the 

 maximum of drunkenness possible to make drunken even 

 those who were not greatly inclined to drunkenness. " At 

 the commencement of the nineteenth century it was enacted 

 that in Sweden the right of distillation should go with the 

 soil, i. e. that it should belong to those who possessed or 

 cultivated the land ; and ten years later the privilege was 

 extended to tenants and other persons resident in the 

 country, if the owner of the estate gave them leave. . . . 

 When the home distillation was allowed, it was a miserable 

 state of things. One peasant would set his still going one 



1 Mr. I. T. M. Hornsby, a journalist of New Zealand, Westminster 

 Gazette. 



