On Monday, Mr. Caine, who has posed throughout the discussion
of the licensing question as the heroic protagonist of the Temperance party, asked the First Lord of the Treasury
whether the Government proposed to proceed with the Local Taxation Bill, which he was so strenuously opposing ; to which Mr. W. H. Smith replied that they had given up the hope of carrying the whole Bill, and would abandon the clauses enabling the County Councils to purchase licences, but that, having allocated the new spirit-duties for the extinction of licences in England, they proposed to carry the corresponding clauses for Ireland and Scotland, and then to ask the House to assent to a new clause authorising the ear-marking and accumulation of the sums so provided until Parliament should have time to deal with the whole question.
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