A Word to Strictly Moderate Drinkers.

Everybody admits that the Liquor Traffic is the source of an enormous amount of mischief, which no law for its proper regulation has ever been able to prevent. For whose sake then to it licensed? Not for the sake of the drunkards, nor for the take of abstainers, but solely for the convenience of moderate users. If you, as a moderate user, recognise that it is for your convenience alone that the traffic is licensed, and if it cannot be licensed for your convenience without entailing the enormous amount of misery and crime which have always resulted from it, we wish to ask you whether you are prepared still for your own convenience to vote for it, or whether you will not rather deny yourself for the sake of others, and resolve that your mere convenience shall not be made any longer responsible for all this crime and misery? Thousands of drunkards will vote against the Liquor Traffic, who would gladly break its power over themselves, and the abstainers will vote against it, so that with your vote as a moderate nser will rest the honour or the responsibility of stopping or of continuing it. We have asked our friend Rev. L. M. Isitt to say a word or two to voters through the medium of these pages. He reminds you that there are estimated to be 17,500 drunkards in this Colony, victims of the traffic licensed for your convenience. If on an average each of them has but five friends—wife, mother, sister, father, brother, son, daughter, or other relatives—and for their sakes you go to the polling booth and simply strike out the top line or the voting paper, there are over 87,000 of them who would gladly give you a warn grip of the hand, and say, "Thank you for that vote!"

Rev. L. M. Isitts Open Letter to you.

Men and Women of New Zealand,—We are not a wealthy folk, but shilling by shilling several hundreds of pounds have be-cheerfully contributed in order to send you this guide. Bead It, we beseech you thoughtfully, earnestly, prayerfully. Remember we have no personal interests to porve—the publicans and brewers fight for gold—we plead for humanity, and at prompted only by the desire to save the drankard and belives from drink-induced misery hundreds of suffering women and children. For their sakes we entreat you Strike out the top line and vote no license.

To-day there are over seventeen hundred licensed liquor bars in this country. "Week in, week out," they do their work with deadly sameness. One of our opponents has admitted that there are seventeen thousand five hundred drunken men and women in New Zealand, and day after day your newspapers chronicle crimes, suicides, deaths, and accidents, as the fruits of the traffic.

This morning the liquor bars were the first shops opened, and before you were ap, miserable men, impelled by an awful thirst—men with palsied hand and broken nerve and aching head—crept into these places to call eagerly for the drink that is destroying them body and soul.

This evening these liquor bars will be the last shops to close, and will then bolch out into the night scores of drunken men and women; and in many a drink-cursed home the wife and mother will lie down, not to sleep, but to weep and pray and think—think, over and over again through the long hours—My God 1 my God ! what shall I do ! He is drunk again I What will become of us! And children little children, will be roughly awakened to conscious hunger and fright, and perchance kicks and blows. I say it is horrible; that it maddens any compassionate heart to realise faintly the suffering drink occasions, and yet it has gone on for so long. Is it to go on for ever? God forbid. To-day it rests with you whether, in your electorate, it shall go on any longer. Yet vote may decide the question—may license the bars for another three years to wreck homes, ensnare your sons, ruin women, and work wrong and wretchedness to helpless children, or close these centres of temptation, and stop their ruinous inflonace, to the heart-felt gratitude of many a poor drunkards wife. Which shall it be! In this struggle we are crying to God to give us the victory. Thousands are praying that he will hear the wail of the children, and mark the tears and agony of those who suffer, and move the hearts of the people to put greed and selfishness under foot, and vote as righteousness and pity prompt. Can you ask God to guide you, and then vote license I In a few hours, voting paper and pencil in band, will you rote to promote good or strengthen evil? By one stroke of the pencil you can license these liquor bars to make more drunkards—break more hearts—or you can do your best to restore many a drink-victim, and bring peace and happiness to many a wretched home. I would to God I know how to influence you to vote aright. Whether you are a teetotaller or net, you cannot be blind to the hurt the liquor traffic [unclear: does]. Remember, no one knows how you [unclear: vote]. Never mind how you have spoken, be true to your own higher and better self now. If you have never struck a blow for righteonsness and the people before, do it now. In the name of God and humanity I plead with you—Strike out the top line and vote no license.—Your sincerly.

Leonard M. Isiter

More Reasons why Everyone Should Vote Against the Liquor Traffic by Simply Striking out the Top Line on the Voting Paper.

1. Alter making fullest allowance for exceptions, there are no persons who do so much sly grog-selling as publicans. Every one knows that they sell out of licensed hours and on Sundays, and to drunken persons continually, and that their trade has always been the most lawless in existence. By means of their licenses they defy the police and the law, and their law-breaking goes unpunished. But when they attempt to do the same without their licensee, as some of them have been trying to do in the Clutha, they are convicted and punished over and over again, until they get tired of it, as they soon will do after this under the new law, under which they will not merely be fined hut will be sent to jail when convicted a second time. It is right that the man who gets his living by taking money for liquor which he knows deprives the drunkard's wife and family of their living should be compelled to get his living in some other way. Continued licenses means continued competition in adultersting, lambing down, Sunday drinking, and other law-breaking; continued local poverty and unhappy homes; continued bad debts and inability to purchase stores; continued corruption of individual social, commercial, municipal, and political life.

2. If you vote for the Liquor Traffic, or fail to vote against it, you cannot complain if some day your wife, husband, son, or daughter becomes a victim of it. Already every person has some friend or acquaintance who has been injured, ruined, or destroyed by it. As long as the Liquor Traffic is tolerated it will produce a crop of drunkards out of every generation, and if you do not vote it out someone dear to you may be its victim.

3. The Liquor Traffic, by impoverishing the people, reduces the demand for the produce of the settler and the manufacturer, and therefore its value also, and correspondingly it reduces the demand for labour, and so also reduces wages; but also by being the source of diminished cash trade, and or the bulk of the bad debts in retail trade—losses which have to be covered by raising prices—it makes the cost of living greater to everyone who honestly pays his way. You cannot spread your breakfast table nor put on a suit of clothes without paying more for them because of the Liquor Traffic.

4. Our taxes will he greatly reduced when we get rid of the Liquor Traffic. To get local revenue from licenses you have to impoverish the district by the amount of money squandered to keep the liquer bars going, and the bulk of this goes out of the district to distant brewers and spirit merchants, and to distillers and brewers in other countries. The poverty and crime caused by the drink piles up more taxes for charitable aid, police, and other expenses involved, than all the revenue, local of colonial, derived from it. The annual drink bill of the Colony merely on the basis of page 9 Customs and Excise returns is at the rate of at least-three pounds per head of the whole population; so if you know the population of your own town or district, you can easily reckon your own local drink bill, if yours is a fair, average place, neither better not worse than others, and thus see how much it reduces local prosperity.

6. Refusing Liquor Licenses does not mean closing needed hotels for boarding and victualling purposes, as is abundantly proved in the Prohibition districts of this Colony and elsewhere. It only makes unlawful the Drink-selling in them.

If licenses are refused, and the boarding business has to be more depended on, the boarding and travelling public will be generally better attended to; more people will have the means to travel and pay for proper board; and only the mere grogblelling public-houses will have to close.

Anyone who would not like to have a liquor License next to his own house should not vote to maintain one next to someone else's house. Therefore, when we get out voting papers let us just strike out the top line, and so vote for purer morals, greater agricultural and industrial prosperity, cleaner politics, and a better respect for everything which makes for righteousness, and will help to make us a great and a free people.

Fair Warning.

Wilberforce of English annals,
Waited patiently for years,
Fighting on though often vanquished
Yielding not to doubts and fears,
Till at length he was rewarded
By the shout of victory;
Through his persevering efforts
Slaves were granted liberty.

Be forewarned, ye politicians,
Eyes are watching far and near;
Your supporters hold the balance—
They will weigh you, never fear.
Be advised; your friends are anxious
You should worthy prove and true,
If you act as you have spoken,
They will firmly stand by you.

But if not, prepare for changes,
For the traffic they will rout;
If you trifle at this crisis
They will vote you down and out,
And elect those who are worthy,
Men whose courage ne'er abates,
Who will face the ranks opposing.
Press the battle to the gates.

Oh, ye temperance men, be faithful,
On your watchtowers firmly stand—
See, the foes of Prohibition
Muster forces through the land.
Buckle on afresh your armour,
And for right still onward press,
God your captain in the conflict,
He will pilot to success.

Mrs. P. L. Grant.

"Little drops of Allsops',
Little drops of Bass',
Steal away the senses,
And make a man an ase."

Australian Mutual Provident Society.

New Zealand Branch :

Head Office, Customhouse Quay, Wellington.

Local Board of Directors:

The Hon. Morgan S. Grace, M.D., C.M.G., M.L.C. (Chairman).

The Hon. Charles J. Johnston, M.L.C. (Deputy Chairman).

Alfred de Bathe Brandon, Esq.

The Hon. Edward Richardson, C.M.G., M.L.C.

John Duncan, Esq.