DISINTERESTED PUBLICANS. N EARLY all the various proposals relating to the
liquor traffic have the common character that they aim at preventing men from drinking intoxicating liquor. They pursue their end in various ways and with various degrees of thoroughness. The Prohibi- tionist treats alcohol as poison,—differing from other poisons only in this, that it has no medicinal value. Consequently he would close every public-house and confine the sale of spirits to the methylated variety. In this country, however, the Prohibitionist is rarely met with. If he is among us, he is commonly found disguised as an advocate of local option or Sunday closing. The poison is still to be sold if the locality wishes it. The accustomed place of resort of the working man is not to be closed to him except on the day of the week when he is most likely to wish to use it. But whether in their extreme or in their modified forms, whether the closing of the public-house be complete or partial, the purpose of these proposals is the same. Men are not treated as reasonable beings whO can be appealed to on the ground of their own welfare, but as children who must be denied what is bad for them. We have the gravest doubts whether this plan can ever have more than a temporary success. The working man may consent to become the subject of one experiment after another for a time, but as they can only be tried on him with his own consent, and no longer than this consent is given, there is good ground to question their staying-power. The winning cry of one day may prove to have lost all its value on another, and the Act which made a triumphal entry into the statute-book may disappear from it amidst equally general applause.
This is one of the reasons which make it important to consider what are the preventible causes of drinking to excess. We Say drinking to excess, and not merely drink- ing, because the tremendous statistics which are published from time to time as to the total consumption of alcohol in the United Kingdom leave us unmoved. It may be unwise in the working man—we ourselves certainly think it is—to spend such and such a fraction of his income in beer, just as it may be unwise in a politician or a man of letters to be curious in his wine or in his cigars. In both cases we are carried into the region of sumptuary laws, and history does not show that this mode of encouraging economy has ever been of much benefit. The aim of the social reformer should be less ambitious. There are police regulations which might be more strictly enforced, and there are direct incitements to drinking which might be taken out of the way. It is with the second of these reforms that we are concerned to-day.
The worst quality of alcohol from the social point of view is that the line of moderation is very easily overstepped. This has been recognised by Parliament in the statutory prohibition against supplying a man with liquor who has already had as much as he can drink without ceasing to be sober. The inevitable weakness of this regulation is that it can never be applied except when a man has already had more than he can drink and remain sober. There is always one special glass that completes the mischief ; but the publican can seldom know that it will have this effect until it is plain that it has had it. The publi- can's story is pretty much the same in all cases. He saw no signs of drunkenness in the customer when he served him, and when he did see them he served him no tnore. The strong point of this account of what happened is that in any given case it may be perfectly accurate. The publican may not be sheltering himself under a plea of incapacity to foresee what the last glass would do; he may have been really unable to foresee it. There are cases without number, indeed, in which the police or the Magis- trates may suspect that the publican is not as innocent as he makes himself out. But unless there happens to be a witness who can testify to the condition of the customer before the last glass was swallowed, they cannot disprove the story as told. When a particular act may be done in perfect good faith, and there is no evidence to show that it was done in bad faith, even a publican has a right to have the more favourable interpretation placed on his conduct. Yet the result of this more favourable interpretation is that a great number of men are turned out of pub]ic- houses, either at closing-time or earlier, after instead of before the mischief has been done. There is only one way that we know of that would really check this disregard of a law which in the great majority of cases it is im- possible to enforce. The difficulty is that the publican is under an obligation, not, indeed, to overstep the legal limit, but to go as near to it as possible. Take the case of a man who is refused drink because the publican thinks that it will make him drunk. This man goes off to a neighbour- ing public-house, relates the story of the insult offered him, has several more glasses, and in the end goes home sober. This comes to the knowledge of the scrupulous publican, and very possibly to the knowledge of his employers, and he is at once charged with neglecting their interests. They have not taken him as their tenant in order to have the sale of their goods hindered. He is there, indeed, to refuse liquor to drunken men ; but he is not to infer from this that he may also refuse it to sober men. Consequently the publican makes a resolution not to be so unnecessarily careful another time. So long as a customer is not drunk he must be accounted sober, and how can he be proved not to be sober until he has had the glass that makes him drunk ? There is a critical moment in these cases ; but the publican's contention is that he cannot recognise it till it is past.
It is at this point that disinterested management becomes so valuable. It removes the temptation to sail as near the wind as possible. On the ordinary system, the more intoxicating liquor the publican sells the better the owners of the house are pleased. They do not wish their house to get a bad name ; but they can comfort themselves with the reflection that if it does the publican will be the sufferer. Thus the publican is placed between tvio fires,—one pale and ineffectual in comparison with the other. On the one side stand his employers, urging him to sell as much as possible of the drink they supply. On the other side stand the police, watching for every instance in which he sells the drink in question to a drunken man, but usually quite unable to prove the charge when they have brought it. To which of these rival claimants is' he likely to pay more obedience ? Obviously to the one who has the greater power of injuring him in the event of dis- obedience. On the disinterested system, on the contrary, the inducement of which we have seen the bad results is altogether absent. More than one Association for promoting disinterested management exists, but there is one which is specially in want of capital at this moment to develop and extend the thoroughly good work it is doing. "The People's Refreshment House Association" was founded by the Bishop of Chester in 1896, and in the ten years during which it has been in existence sixty-one licensed houses have come under its control. They are to be found in most districts of England and Wales, from Yorkshire to Cornwall, and the secretary reports that they have been managed successfully both from the temperance and the financial point of view. "No manager has been convicted of any offence against the Licensing Acts, and the maximum dividend of 5 per cent. has been continuously paid 'since 1899, whilst £480 has been placed to reserve." The sincerity of the intention with which the business is carried on may be inferred from the composition of the Council. Men like the Bishops of Chester and Southwark, Archbishop Bourne, Lord Rinnaird, Lord Grey, and Mr. Noel Buxton may be mistaken in their methods of promoting temperance, but no doubt can be entertained as to their desire to promote it. The principle on which these houses are conducted is very simple. The only motive which can possibly influence a manager in the direction of permitting drunkenness is taken away. We have seen how difficult it is for a publican to refuse to serve a customer unless he is visibly in a condition in which the law forbids him to be served. He has to discover the last limit of sobriety, because if he stops short of that limit the effect of his action will be seen in diminished profits to his employers. The manager of a Trust public-house is under no such obliga- tion. He knows that as regards his employers the suspicion of permitting drunkenness is the one which will do him most harm, while as regards himself he is without any possible reason for incurring such a suspicion, since he makes nothing by the sale of beer, wines, or spirits, and a good deal by the sale of everything else. The object of the Association is to convert the public-house into a real house of refreshment,—a house to which a man may resort without being pressed to drink any intoxicating liquor, and with the certainty that he will find food and non- intoxicants, and unadulterated intoxicants if he drinks them at his own unsolicited choice. We hope that in the next Licensing Bill a large place will be given to the encouragement of this method of dealing with temperance reform, and in the meantime any one who wishes to help it on can do so, without waiting for the Government or Parliament, by taking shares in what has proved itself a fair 5 per cent. investment.
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