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Why Good Templars are Prohibitimists.

New Zealand Good Templar Tracts, No. 4.

1. Because they are personal abstainers. They have, from a convition of its evil nature, given up, or avoided the use of intoxicating liquor as beverage. Experience and experiment have taught them that they are in every snse better without it.

2. Because they are satisfied that the public traffic in alcoholic drinks is essentially an evil. (1). Morally, it is always lowering and debasng in its tendencies. Wherever the traffic exists the community is the worse for it. Youths and maidens are corrupted by it, and men and women fall before it. This is a rule that has no exception. (2). It is commercially corrupting. Many who deal in it conduct the business in a manner which they would be ashamed of and despise in any other trade. (3). It is politically vicious. It undermines the principles of political economy. Its manufacture is a destruction of useful pro race, a waste of labour, and a dissipation of wealth. There is absolutely no reproductive return for the value put into it. While on the other hand, it produces evils of countless kinds. The only fruit which the traffic produces for the labour and capital sunk in its manufacture is found in disappointment, wretchedness, and crime. We therefore pronounce it radically bad.

3. Because we believe it criminal to license any traffic which we find to be only pernicious in its influence. It is impossible for an honest elector, who realises the responsibility of his vote to stultify his convictions, by granting to any man authority to do that which he knows will produce evil to some other man, and probably to many men. To vote merely for a reduction of the number of licenses to sell liquor is simply confining the power to continue the evil traffic to a monopoly. Does it become any less wrong to license ten evil agents, than to license twenty? The wrong lies less in the quantity of the agencies than in the quality of the agents. By simply reducing the number we perpetuate our authority for the commission of acts which we know are certain to do much harm and no good. Being convinced of the destructive character of the liquor traffic, Good Templars, as honest voters, are compelled to repudiate any responsibility with it, and to vote in accordance with the evidence and with conscience.

4. Because the right to vote is the power to give practical expresssion to a personal conviction of that which is good. The Good Templar argues: My conviction being that the liquor traffic is bad, and that to authorise its continuance would be to endorse, or become an accessory to, what my conviction proonounces wicked and criminal: I am, perforce of my sense of right and wrong, bound to use my vote to give practical expression to my view of what is right and good. Others may not share my convictions; it is for them to answer the promptings of their own consciences, as I have to answer mine. In self-defence, as a neighbour and a patriot I am bound to carry out my true sense of right in opposition to wrong. As a rational being, I have no justification for making a compromise between right and wrong; Reformation has never sprung from compromises. When we have settled a principle, all the force of reason demands obedience to its directions.

5. Because private conduct and public action should be consistent. I am a unit in the State, but I am a teetotal unit. My private character is that of a tectotaller; so should my public character be. So far as I am concerned, my position is "Total Abstinence from all intoxicating liquors for this unit'" in my relation to society, and as I am in society, so I am in the State. I am in harmony with myself. In whatever place I am, my "watchword" is "Total Abstiunce." I no more need the liquor traffic as a member of society. Therefore, to be conasstent, I must be a Prohibitionist.

6. Because we are banded together to hasten the time when the means of intoxication shall be driven from our land. We are the declared enemy of the traffic. As it is the foe of human welfare so are we its antagonists. From the first our flag has been unfolded to summon to the war those who seek the everthrow of the tyrant alcohol. Prohibition is the goal of our work, but from the time we take our obligation we are recognised as the avowed opponentss of the trade in liquors, and as men who have hoisted the device, "No Peace with school."