Crime, Pauperism, Death.

A very brief summary of the kind of evidence obtainable must suffice for a reminder of the mischiefs wrought by strong drink. In England, Scotland, Ireland, America and in these colonies, judges have agreed in branding it from the bench as the most prolific source of crime, their estimates of the proportion to be ascribed to it varying from the 90 per cent. of Lord Coleridge, the late Chief Justice of England, and scores of others, to the two-thirds which is our own Chief Justice's estimate for this Colony. page 213 Inside the prisons this testimony has been confirmed by jailers and prison chaplains: "80 per cent. of the men who have passed through my hands would not have come there but for the drink," was the opinion recently expressed by the keeper of the Wellington Gaol. A similar tale is told by philanthropists and city missionaries of the wrecks and outcasts among whom they have worked. "Nine-tenths of our poverty, squalor, vice and crime spring from this poisonous tap-root," says General Booth. 99 per cent. was Dr. Guthrie's calculation of the proportion of destitute children who owed their destitution to drink; and Dr. Barnardo, who at first thought the statement a gross exaggeration, arrived at a minimum of 90 per cent., and became a total abstainer in consequence. In New Zealand a Benevolent Trustee of large experience in this City, and the head of a Charitable Institution in Chrisichurch, have both debited liquor with 90 per cent. of the cases that have come before them. This proportion gives us 1400 as the number of "neglected and criminal" children in our industrial schools at the end of 1893 through the drinking habits of their parents, and 150 as the number added by that cause in 1894. To anyone with a sense for the value of home life and the sacredness of childhood—in other words, for the worth of a human soul and its infinite aptitudes for good or for evil which are involuntarily shaped by early impressions and associations—statistics of this class tell a more tragic tale than any form of adult suffering. As to the death rate, the highest authority on inebriety in England, Dr. Norman Kerr, who took up the matter some years ago with the avowed object of upsetting the extravagant estimate which ascribed 60,000 deaths in the United Kingdom annually to this cause, came to the conclusion that 120,000—about four times the entire population of Wellington—was nearer the truth. Another high authority places the number as high as 200,000. In our own little Colony the number has been estimated at 1000. The data are somewhat uncertain, and I have not been able to check the calculation, but it does not appear to me excessive, and is less than half the English rate.^* Consider it for a moment—1000 deaths from drink every year in this sparsely populated country, 20 every week; 20 have gone since page 214 our last Sunday service; 20 more will go before the church bells ring again, or shall I say before the wine goes round again at the Christian's Sunday dinner ?