2 MAY 1908, Page 11

(TO TIIE maven OP THIS " SPECTATOR...1

you allow a brewery investor space to reply to your suggestion (Spectator, April 25th) that we are levying a kind of blackmail by making our gifts to religious and charitable undertakings dependent upon the defeat of the Bill ? I and some others I could name have stopped our subscriptions to hospitals, &c., for the same reason that has caused us to give up cigarettes and whisky. We can no longer afford them. At a moment when we have been bled almost white by the competition of tea, the war-tax, the 1904, Act, &c., the present Bill is brought forward, proposing to take what little blood is left in us under the name of com- pensation. We have ourselves and our wives and our little