Prohibition supporters deemed "fools"

On the Prohibition issue next Thursday it is not so much Prohibition that will be put to the vote, approved or condemned, as the intelligence of the people of New Zealand. I am prepared for anything, except one thing - a New Zealand demonstration of Carlyle's bitter saying, "My countrymen are thirty millions, mostly fools." New Zealanders are not "mostly fools." If Thursday next confutes me, there is no more to be said. Until then, at any rate, I abide in my present faith. Prohibition argument, so called, has assumed that we are mostly fools. The improvement, real or imagined, in no-license districts where everybody can get liquor if he wants it is constantly alleged as argument for national prohibition - the surrounding of New Zealand by a ring-fence within which nobody will be able to get any liquor at all.

This state of things, contrary to nature, reason, liberty, and the habits of well-conducted people, exists nowhere. It never has existed. There is no example of it in history. Mr A. S. Adams actually makes it a merit that nowhere in New Zealand does no license mean no liquor. See recent advertisements. And yet at a stroke we are to make no license no liquor the rule for the whole country. It cannot be. Vote against continuance and you vote for the intolerable, the impossible, the absurd. - Civis.

• Mr L. Birks, assistant to Mr Parry, Government Electrical Engineer, is at present on a visit to Dunedin. Mr Birks has just returned from Mataura, where he has been engaged investigating the conditions in connection with an application made by the Mataura Borough Council for the necessary license to install electric light in private houses and to alter the existing system of street lighting. Licenses for the generation and distribution of electrical energy were formerly issued by the Telegraph Department, but all matters in connection therewith have now been brought under the control of the Public Works Department.

• Our Cromwell correspondent says this has been one of the coldest springs ever experienced in that district, with several snowstorms and exceptionally cold rains on the low country. There has been very little growth, but still the low country is looking exceptionally well, also the crops throughout the district.

Shearing has been delayed considerably, and some losses have been made owing to the cold snap on newly shorn sheep. The lambing generally will be fair, but not up to previous years. On Thursday one of the most violent electrical storms ever experienced there occurred, the lightning being very vivid and the thunder very severe. At about 3.30pm a terrific hail storm set in, the hailstones being larger than peas, lasting for about three minutes.

Several travellers on the roads had narrow escapes from accidents.

• "My experience tells me," said Mr Kettle, S.M. at the Magistrate's Court in Auckland yesterday, "that a large number of young women who get married find the marriage ties irksome to them. They prefer the easy life - a life of gaiety and enjoyment, - and as an old magistrate, knowing what I do, I see great change that has come over a great number of young men and women.

"I see this constantly, and it weighs heavily upon me. If the homes are to be unhappy and broken up, then the country must go down with them." - ODT, 2.12.1911.