The "Wine Industry."

!"The fact of the matter is that if Victoria is to compete successfully with Italy is the wine trade, Victorian workers must be dragged down to the Italian level. Even the penny-an-hour rate is higher than the Italian, so that further reductions may be necessary. The wine industry is a [unclear: monstrous] Pandora's Box in the potentialities for mischief which it possesses, but the workers should sternly oppose its extension for this reason alone—that it can [unclear: aly] thrive by reducing its employes to the most impoverished of the [unclear: ld] world peasantry."

Mr. John Vale, of Melbourne, forwarding the above quotation, wrote :—" The evils of the wine industry are great. The industry has attained its fullest development in the Rutherglen district. At a large meeting in Rutherglen I mentioned Mr. Bragato's theory, that wine drinking promotes sobriety, with the intention of refatin it, but the audience laughed so heartly at the idea that I saw it was un-necessary refute the statement in a place where the theory is put to the test of practice. As a matter of fact, there is no pther part of the Colony where drunkenness abounds to the same extent, and the drunkenness is generally of the most [unclear: hestly] kind. Steaking generally, our wine shops, both in city and country, are the lowest kind of drink shops we nave, . . . I pray that your Colony may be saved from the establishment of this evil.

"With best wishes, I remain, yours very truly,—John Vale."

An official report made by the Adelaide Commissioner of Police said :—" I cannot in an official return divide the separate cases of drunkenness into those that have occurred in wine shops and those that have taken place in public-houses, but I have no doubt that the sale of colonial wine has in-creased drunkenness to a great extent especially in the country districts. Colonial wine has to compete with colonial beer, and to do so it must be made cheap, and to be cheap it must be sold so new that it can-not have matured sufficiently to he whole-some; in this state, when drunk in large quantities, as it frequently is drunk, it produces a type of drunkenness which assumes a very dangerous character, and which often produces madness."