On Monday, Lord Randolph Churchill attended the banquet of the
Country Brewers' Society held at the Hotel Mitropole, and to a sympathetic audience unfolded his scheme for settling the licensing question. We have dealt at length with his pro- posal elsewhere, and will only notice here that it seems to have all the faults of the old schemes and some new ones of its own in addition. Lord Randolph's plan was, he reminded his audience, introduced into Parliament in 1868; but owing to "powerful enemies in quarters where he did not expect to find them," it came to nothing. "Mr. Groschen, in the year 1888, took the matter out of my hands, thinking that I knew nothing about it, and that he could settle it with much greater ease and much greater success. The Government of that day was not very friendly to me, and 'there was a king in Egypt that knew not Joseph." After dwelling with no little complacency on the fact that the Unionist Government nearly suffered shipwreck, Lord Randolph Churchill in his own inimitable style remarked, "I think I have shown you that I should not have made such a mess as that." Lord Randolph Churchill ended his speech by declaring that licensing reform can only be carried by means of a private Member's Bill to which the Government of the day would give facilities. He is, we think, right. No mere party solution is likely to be satis- factory.
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