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Facts.

The National Education Bill of the Colony is about £400,000 a year. The National Drink Bill is yearly £2,000,000. We spend, therefore, nearly five times the amount on beer that we spend on brains—yet there is an outcry as against the cost of Education.

The adult male and female population amounts to about 280,400. If every adult would give the cost of a quarter of a glass of beer a day it would cover the whole cost of National Education, and nearly half as much more!

In the Gaols, Lunatic Asylums, Refuges, Reformatories, Hospitals, and other institutions, mainly supported by the taxpayer, there is a floating population of between 2,000 and 3,000 persons of both sex. Most of them have got where they are through drink!

The total consumption of intoxicating drinks per annum in the Colony amounts to £3 4s. per head—men, women, youths, girls, and sucking babies. You ask what have "babies" to do with strong drink? In the Children's Hospital in England hundreds die from hob-nailed liver—the last development of alcoholic disease in a confirmed drunkard. Thousands more, no doubt, die of it outside the hospitals. Of course, in these cases, it is the result of drinking in the parents.

The enormous evils which flow from intoxicating drink surpass those inflicted on the world by war, pestilence, and famine combined. [W. E. Gladstone quoting Charles Buxton, the great British brewer]. The experience of centuries has proved that there is no remedy for this evil, as for most others, except the removal of the cause. Enact and enforce prohibition by the will of the people, or absolutely as is being done in many countries, and in a few years all these evils will disappear. There is no other method. Education, moderation, and even religious teaching are all powerless as a National remedy in the presence of the Licensed Liquor Trade.