THE DEBATE ON THE LICENSING BILL. T HE House of Commons
does not show any sense of alarm as to the judgment of the country upon the Government licensing proposals. It rejected Mr. Caine's amendment on Thursday night by a majority of 73, and we believe that the country will sustain the House in its decision. The real question is whether the Total Abstinence party or the Government have shown the truer anxiety to help the Temperance cause. And it seems to us that the debate might be judged by a comparison between the speeches of Mr. Gladstone and Mr. W. H. Smith. It is not often that Mr. W. H. Smith has obtained a rhetorical victory over Mr. Gladstone, and doubtless to those who heard both speeches, Mr. Gladstone's may have seemed the more /impressive. But we undertake to say that among unbiassed readers of the debate, Mr. W. H. Smith will seem to have a great advantage over Mr. Gladstone, not only in argument, but in form, not only in his appeal to facts, but in the mode in which he presented and discussed the facts. Mr. Gladstone was too elaborate, and did not fairly meet the charge that he is now directly retracting the opinions he urged with great emphasis ten years ago. First he said that since he urged those opinions, the law had been more clearly expounded, and the legal right of the publican to compensation for withdrawn licences had been authoritatively denied. No doubt ; and the Government do not challenge this. On the contrary, they urge upon the public that every enlargement which may have been made in the right or in the practice of the Magistrates in relation to the refusal to renew licences, shall be carefully guarded, and that nothing in this Bill shall in the least degree impair or reduce the disposition of the Magistrates to curtail the facilities for drinking. But next, Mr. Gladstone declared that his own emphatic approval of the principle of compensation was given, not in relation to any small plan like that now before the House of Commons, "but with respect to a general and sweeping measure for the extinction of all public-houses whatever." Was any such "general and sweeping measure" ever seriously contemplated by any statesman? And if it had been, would not it have been infinitely more intolerable to find compensation amounting to hundreds of millions, than to find compensation amounting to a few hundred thousand pounds ? It appears to us that Mr. Gladstone now suggests that he might have approved of raising a new National Debt to pass a Maine Law, but that he wholly disapproves of devoting a moderate sum to paring away the redundant alehouses and gin-palaces in districts where there are none but respectable houses, but too many of them for the wants of the district.
Mr. W. H. Smith's answer to Mr. Gladstone was as lucid as it was pithy. First he showed that, whatever may be the legal rights of the Licensing Magistrates, they are not in fact using them to suppress any but the badly managed public-houses where there is disorder and inattention to rules. He showed that out of 67,100 licences renewed in five years, only 31 had been suppressed except on the ground of irregularity in the conduct of those who kept them. Of course it is pure nonsense to talk of that as a progressive tendency to use existing powers for the reduction of the number of public-houses, and, indeed, the Magistrates can hardly be expected to deny the equitable claim to a renewal, when the State itself estimates the goodwill of a public-house as a better property than that of almost any other business. And yet this it does in the charge it makes for probate and succession duty. Without the licence, the goodwill of a public-house is, of course, per- fectly worthless ; yet the publican may count so fully on the renewal of the licence, that when he dies, his family pays a higher probate-duty on the business than most other tradesmen. How is it possible, then, to maintain that without some means of buying out the superfluous publicans, there is any reasonable chance at all of diminishing their number ? The feeling which appears to show itself uppermost in the opposition to the Government Bill, is one of something like fury that any one should propose to be morally just to a class which is itself so unjust as the class of publicans. No one on the Government side of the House maintains that the publicans have any legal right to compensation in any case, or any moral right to it when there has been abuse of the licence. On the other hand, no one on the Opposition side of the House has ventured to maintain that if the publicans are to be treated as by all but universal precedent they have been treated hitherto by the Bench, in relation to the renewal of their licences, it would be possible to refuse to renew a great number of licences to small but respectable houses. Of course, by inflicting a very gross and glaring injustice,—namely, the confiscation of property in which the licence-holders had invested their savings, with every reason to expect that their savings would be safe,—the number of public-houses could be greatly reduced. But even Mr. Caine could not deny that if the Licensing Magistrates were to proceed on the same principle on which Mr. Childers proposed to proceed in 1883, when he asked for leave to suppress certain collectors of taxes who were only appointed annually, but who had so reasonable an expectation of reappointment that they had sacrificed all their other personal prospects in life on the faith of that reappointment, a great many licence-holders the withdrawal of whose licences would be beneficial to the community, must receive pecuniary consideration, not to call it compensation, for the disappointment of their legitimate confidence, a disappointment due to no fault of their own. But, while Mr. Caine admitted this, he struggled against the conse- quences of his own admission. His predominant feeling might be rendered as a new translation of the familiar maxim, Fiat justitia, ruat ecelunt, which would run in his case, not 'Let justice be done, even though the firmament should rush down on us,' but 'If justice is to be done in such a case as this, surely the firmament would rush down on us.' The fanatics of total abstinence cannot con- ceive that justice is to be called justice any longer, if it involves justifying the claim of a publican to sell wine or beer or spirits. Their real assumption is that the class are hostes humani generis, to whom no quarter should be given, and to whom no principle of good faith can be held to apply. Now, we have always held with the Bishop of Chester, whose admirable speech a couple of months ago we noticed at the time, that great mischief has been done by treating this class as in some sense a class of outlaws, and that a great deal of good might be done by making them feel that they have great opportunities of preventing harm, and even of doing good, if they would but exercise their calling in an anxiously conscientious spirit. We quite understand and duly estimate the danger of solidi- fying and establishing the rather dubious claim which publicans now have, and are perfectly aware that they have, to either a renewal of their licence, or else something in the nature of compensation if it be not renewed. We would on no account increase the average value of the quasi- vested interest in licences by doing anything that would make public-houses, after the Bill was passed, sell on an average for larger sums than they sell for now. And no doubt the difficulty is to steer the middle course between one of flagrant injustice and confiscation on the one hand, and a boon to the publicans, which would greatly increase the present value of their property, on the other hand. We are as much opposed to the one course as to the other. And we do not doubt for a moment that Mr. Ritchie is as much opposed to the one course as to the other. His object has evidently been to steer a just course between the two, and we feel sure that a just course between the two is aimed at by this Bill. But the wish to take such a course is not what Mr. Caine's speech or Sir W. Harcourt's speech expressed. The Opposition tone was : Perish the publicans, rather than that one new temptation should fall in the way of a man disposed to drink.' They seemed to be asking nearly all through : How can a publican have rights ?' Well, our deliberate conviction is that alcoholic drinks ought to be sold, though they ought to be sold under careful regu- lation; that they are definitely useful to a considerable class of the community ; that they give in any case clearly legitimate pleasure to those who are not self-indulgent ; and that the very worst expedient that can be imagined for the proper regulation of their sale, is to convince the publican that he is excluded from the society of all high- minded men, and regarded as a man without ideals and without rights. That is the way to make him utterly reckless, not to redeem him ; and until you redeem him, you will never redeem those who are under his influence and more or less at his mercy.
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