THE LICENSING BILL AND COMPENSATION.
THE Licensing Bill has one merit and many faults, and the latter seem likely to attract more notice than' its virtue. It does aim at carrying out in the course of the next fourteen years a sound financial reform. We have in the liquor trade, or, rather, in the particular branch of that trade which is concerned with the sale of beer and spirits for consumption in public-houses, a monopoly of great value. Hitherto we have almost given that monopoly away. The State has fenced round the business of the great value. Hitherto we have almost given that monopoly away. The State has fenced round the business of the publican, and by consequence of the brewers and distillers who supply the publican, with a complete network of pro- tection. Unlike his fellows, whether in towns or villages, he is guarded against unrestricted competition. No rival public-house can be opened without the Licensing' Justices being satisfied that it is for the public benefit that this should be done. He has, it is true, been somewhat harassed of late years by police regulations, but for a long time he had things pretty much his own way. Both he and his employers put a good. deal of money into their pockets, and the sources from which that money came have not yet run dry. Yet for this wholly exceptional position nothing approaching its real' value was paid. Successive Chancellors of the Exchequer taxed now malt and now beer, but when they came to licenses they shut their eyes to the value of the trade carried on in many publichouses, and contented themselves with charging a modest percentage on the annual value. Even this percentage took no notice of the larger houses.
It began with an annual value of under £10, but it stopped short at an annual value of £700. No matter what might be the amount of liquor sold in the year, the State claimed no more than £60 in return for the monopoly it had granted. Mr. Asquith's Bill will eventually put an end to this waste of public money,— for what other name does a system deserve which creates a whole framework of law for the benefit of a particular trade, and takes next to nothing in return for the benefit thus conferred If the Bill passes, this purposeless generosity will be no longer exercised. At the end of the time-limit from April 5th, 1909, every application for the renewal of a then subsisting license will be treated as an application for a new license, and be subject to whatever payment Parliament shall think fit to impose. Chancellors of the Exchequer will then regard publicans and brewers as legitimate objects of taxation. No doubt, their sense of the financial interest of the country will prevent them from pitching their demands too high. But so long as this precaution is observed licenses may be made to pay a reasonable and non-prohibitive price. Be the monopoly worth much or little, a considerable share of its value should find its way into the Treasury.
It is obvious that a reform of this magnitude will need: to be carried out with extreme circumspection. The public has a right to resume the privilege it has so long left to others ; but it is bound to pay adequate compensation to those whom it has first petted and then dispossessed. In an ideal community this process would be attended by no difficulty. The Government would say :—" So many years hence we are going to deprive you of the exclusive rights you have so long enjoyed free owing to our negligence, and we intend to pay you the fair value of the rights thus resumed. What that value is is a matter of actuarial computation. There is a class of men whose whole time is spent in working out calcula- tions of this kind, and we shall call in the services of some of the most distinguished members of the pro- fession. They will go thoroughly into all the particulars furnished them by you. Your figures will, of course, be checked at every point, but they will be instructed to take care to administer even justice between you and the State, and to ensure that while the State pays you nothing more than your due, it also pays you nothing less." These, we say, would be the proper terms on which to settle the amount of compensation to be paid if the Licensing Bill becomes law. Unfortunately, any Bill con. tabling these clauses would ruin the Government which introduced it and the party which supported it. When once any large section of the English people has per- suaded itself that it is wrong to do justice, the passing of any measure intended to do justice becomes very difficult. The conscience of the public has to this extent become perverted, and however much we may lament that it should be so, we have to bear the fact in mind if we wish to legislate on the subject to which the scruple relates. A great number of people have convinced themselves that the liquor trade is a thing by itself. Till now, they assert, it has been allowed to profit by the misery of others. It has built up vast fortunes on the poverty to which it has been the principal contributing cause. If it had its deserts, it would be brought to a sudden and final close. Publican and brewer would alike be deprived of their ill-gotten gains, ains and if both were left to end their days in the work- houses which they had filled with their victims, substantial, if rough, justice would be done.' It is useless to reason with people of this type. They and we have no common point from which to start. What to us is a matter of ordinary fair dealing, of making good losses which we have made men suffer, not for any special fault of their own, but because our way of looking at the situation has changed, is to them an act of national repentance for a national sin. Unrighteous toleration, they would say, cannot be made to cease without the infliction of indi- vidual suffering. A tender-hearted Judge may pity the criminal whom he condemns to death or imprisonment, but he must not allow his feelings to make the sentence any the lighter. A Government which feels bound to frame a drastic Licensing Bill in these circumstances cannot make it a really just one. It is, in fact, very much like framing a Disestablishment Bill. The nation has made up its mind to work out a radical change in the position of a special class of traders. It is willing to respect vested interests up to a point, but it will not leave it to an actuary, however eminent, to say where that point is to be fixed. It will be judge in its own cause, and fix for itself the amount and the source of compensation. The losers may get better terms in this or that particular, but they are not likely to alter the whole basis and method of the calculations on which the Bill rests.
There are at least three particulars in which the Bill might be amended so as to work less injustice than it promises to work if its present form is maintained. Assuming that the radical vice of the compensation proposals is beyond remedy, and that the losses inflicted by legislation are to be made good, not by the State which is the author of that legislation, but by the losers who are the objects of it, the first improvement would be the extension of the time-limit. It is plain that the possibility of creating a sinking fund must primarily depend on the number of years allowed for building it up. We have no wish to press any one figure on Mr. Asquith ; indeed, we should prefer to see the time-limit made a matter of private negotiation between experts on both sides. It is not likely, we fear, that any time-limit will wholly satisfy these opposite classes of persons, but at all events the number of years ultimately fixed would have been determined on with fuller knowledge of the facts and greater regard for the legitimate interests threatened. A second modification relates to the source from which the contribution is to be drawn. In this, as, indeed, in almost all the controversies relating to licensing, the brewer is regarded as the chief, if not the sole, offender. A listener to much of the rhetoric in which the temperance reformer ordinarily indulges might suppose that beer is the one form of alcohol known in this country. It is beer that the working man swills in such vast quantities. It is for beer that lie is always sending his child to the public- house. It is the bad citizens who provide the beer, whether they be called brewers or publicans, that are responsible for all the crime and almost all the misery in the country. But is there no place in the indictment for the distiller ? Does alcohol lose its intoxicating value when it takes the form of spirits ? Is gin, for example, a perfectly innocuous drink supplied at cost price by the benevolent maker, and sharing with tea the claim to "cheer but not inebriate" the consumer ? We fear that not one of these contentions can be made good. WI, cannot pretend to fix the exact proportion in which the responsibility for drunkenness is divided between beer and spinte, but we have no doubt that the drunkenness of which spirits is the exciting cause is the worse form of the two,— worse as regards poverty by reason of its effect upon health, worse as regards crime by reason of its effect on temper. Consequently we would have the distiller bear his fair share in the provision of compensation. We know of no title to exemption that he can possibly set up. His gains are at least as large. The goods he sells do at least as much to make public-houses profitable. The drink that he enables the publican to serve out to his customers, if taken in excess, does a great deal more harm than the comparatively harmless drink provided by the brewer. In no one of these particulars can we recognise any just claim to the exceptionally favourable treatment which, as far as we can judge, the distiller meets with iu Mr. Asquith's Bill. Some interesting facts and figures in regard to this point are to be found in a letter signed "Z." in our issue of to-day. A third amendment might be the retention of the present method of ascertaining the value of a license.
We have said nothing about the worst faults of the Bill, —that it aims at embodying the favourite nostrums of temperance reformers rather than at introducing any genuine improvement in the relations between drink and either poverty or crime, and that it runs the risk of encouraging drinking in clubs under conditions which do not make for sobriety. The letter describing a working- men's club in the Daily Chronicle of Thursday makes one hesitate to give occasion for the wholesale creation of such places of entertainment. But this is too large a question to be entered upon towards the close of an article.
We have one word more to say on the subject. It is to ask a question. If the brewers will be so terribly injured in their pockets by the Bill as they allege—as far as we can judge, their dread of great pecuniary loss is perfectly genuine—why cannot they agree to put up the retail price of beer ? That would be unpopular, no doubt, but the unpopularity would fall, not on the brewers, but on the Government, and the brewers can hardly be expected to mind that. No doubt there might be a certain check in consumption, but the rise in price could easily be made to meet and overcome that tendency. The mass of mankind will not drink much less beer because they have to pay a halfpenny more for it per glass. We suppose we shall be told that the brewers could not be got to agree not to undersell each other. But surely that must be a mistake granted that the position is as desperate as it is represented. At any rate, the public will not take the complaints as to ruin seriously until recourse is had to this very natural expedient. If the brewers can combine, as they clearly can, to fight the Bill, it is difficult to believe that they are unable to combine to prevent it reducing them to beggary should it pass. For ourselves, it seems that increasing the retail price is the legitimate way for a trade to protect itself from the consequences of what it regards as unjust taxation.
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