We have been perfectly overwhelmed this week with letters, most
of them unusually long, about the Permissive Bill and the history of free licensing in Liverpool. We have printed one, not because it is worth reading, for there is nothing in it, but because it is official, and must decline the remainder. We cannot turn the Spectator into a supplement to the Alliance News, and do not believe that the subject is one on which readers are instructed by needless words. After all, the question lies in a nut-shell. If it is advisable to prohibit or restrict the liquor trade, it is advisable to do so throughout England, and not in parishes selected by the haphazard voting of incompetent ratepayers. A moral chess- board of that sort, with license legal on the black squares and illegal on the white, is a childish and immoral absurdity.
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