Sober by Act of Parliament

by Fred A. McKenzie

Mr. Caine, in talking to a Pall Mall Gazette interviewer, said, when dealing with the compensation proposals of the Church Temperance Society: “The time plan would work in this way: You might give to all old licences a definite lease of life, ten years being the utmost limit conceivable.... At the close of the ten years’ term licences would be granted for one year only, and no compensation whatever would be granted in case of extinction.... (It) would present to temperance reformers the attractive and important feature of finality. It certainly demands most careful consideration on all hands.”

Mr. Chamberlain, in 1876, proposed terms very similar to these. His idea, when discussing the buying up of licensed premises in order to commence municipal public-houses, was that compensation should be paid to the licence holder alone at the rate of five years’ profit, based on the average profits of the previous three years.

Truth compels the admission, however, that Mr. Chamberlain’s views on this point have greatly altered in recent years. In writing to me in April, 1894, he said:—“Further consideration has convinced me that the method of compensation proposed by me in 1876 would not be the best guide to a fair settlement, and that it would be impossible to ignore the interests of other persons besides the licensed holder. I think now that the best way would be to submit all claims to an official arbitrator, who would be instructed to give for the property such sum as would be given by a willing buyer to a willing seller in the open market—in other words, the fair market price.”

Licensing Bodies.—Of whom should the licensing bodies consist? There are three different kinds of bodies proposed: (a) The magistrates, as at present; (b) county and town councils; (c) elective boards ad hoc. The magistrates have for long carried out the necessary duties; and in the country parts they have done as well as could be expected. In towns, more particularly in small boroughs, their rule has not worked quite so satisfactorily. Occasional charges of being influenced by pecuniary considerations in the performance of their duties have been brought against them; but such charges are so very rare that direct bribery may be said to be practically unknown. But magistrates in small boroughs are often influenced by some very extra-judicial considerations. Many of them are small tradesmen, appointed for political reasons. They are well acquainted with the brewer who is at the back of the application for a licence, and possibly have business transactions with him: naturally they do not care to offend him, and so a licence is often granted when it ought not to be.

The licensing authority is altogether outside the usual province of the magistrate’s duties, which should be purely judicial. It has never been found satisfactory to unite judicial and executive functions in one body; and jurists are agreed that this should be avoided; yet while they are the licensing authority the magistrates are both administrators and judges. But the principal objection to magistrates is that they are not in the least representative, and can do as they please entirely irrespective of the public.

A proposal favoured by many statesmen is that of taking the duty of issuing licences from the magistrates and placing it in the hands of county and borough councils. A representative body would thus be secured; but the result of this would simply be to ruin many of the councils. The liquor question would swallow up every other in public estimation, like a veritable Joseph’s rod. Men would be elected solely because of their views on licensing reform. The publicans would appoint their candidates, and the teetotalers theirs; and both parties would have a pitched battle at almost every election. Many good administrators, rather than face such contests, would remain outside, and the whole tone of the councils would be lowered.

The most practicable plan of securing a popular licensing authority seems to be the election of Boards specially for this one purpose, as School Boards are elected for the management of elementary schools. The area which such Boards control should not be too small and particular care would have to be taken to prevent those pecuniarily interested in the traffic getting on them.

But it must be remembered that no change in the personnel of the licensing authority will effect much, and it is possible that any change may do harm. A representative body will be more liable to be influenced by outside consideration than are the justices; and the Boards in some places will favour the drink sellers more than the magistrates do now. This consideration has induced some reformers to advocate leaving the administration in the hands of the present authorities, but limiting their power by a direct popular control over the issuance of new licences.

Clubs.—No licensing reform, however complete the restraints it places on public-houses, will accomplish much unless at the same time it deals with the club evil. In the ordinary drinking club we have something far more dangerous to society than the worst-conducted public-house. Reformers were for long so absorbed in fighting the open drink shop, that they had no time for attending to anything else; and statesmen of all parties dreaded arousing against themselves the opposition which they knew would follow the curtailing of any of the privileges of club-land. The result is that there is to-day in every large town a considerable and rapidly increasing number of drinking dens, subject to no control, paying no fees, requiring no licences, and allowed to keep open all day and every day, Sunday and week-day alike. With the genuine club no one wishes to meddle; but the majority of places which go under this name are nothing but drinking and gambling hells, and are usually financed by, and run for the profit of, some brewer. Within ten years their number has increased almost tenfold, and from all parts of the land comes the same tale of the mischief they are doing. Some months ago, the Dublin Corporation sent a petition to the Government in which it said: “We view with alarm and dismay the rapid increase of bogus drinking clubs in all parts of the city; in our opinion these clubs are a prolific source of poverty, crime, and disorder; they are instrumental in depreciating the ratable value of property wherever they are established; and the laws which allow, without let or hindrance, their degrading operations at all hours of the night and of the day, are a disgrace to civilisation.” The Corporation urged the Government to introduce a measure “that will be effective in grappling with this degrading and pestiferous evil”. At Cardiff the notorious “Field Clubs,” formed solely and avowedly for the purpose of supplying their members with ale on Sundays, and so setting the Sunday Closing Act at defiance, were able to carry on business for some time without any hindrance from the police. A case which shows even more clearly than this how our licensing system is being reduced to little better than a mere farce, was mentioned last year in the House of Commons. The licence of a certain village public-house had been taken away because of the misconduct of the publican, and because the place was not required. Thereupon the brewer who owned the building opened it as a club, making the former publican manager. The rules were carefully drawn up, with the aid of counsel, to keep the house open to as many as possible; an entrance fee of a few pence was fixed; and the club was in a position to accommodate almost all its old customers. It had not to observe any of the regulations imposed on the regular drink shops, and consequently did twice as much business as before its licence was taken away.

Such instances might be multiplied indefinitely, but there is no need; for to all who know anything of the inner life of our great cities these things are commonplaces. How to deal with these bogus establishments, and yet not at the same time to unduly interfere with genuine clubs, has become an urgent and serious question. The Royal Commission on the Sunday Closing (Wales) Act recommended that all clubs where intoxicating liquors are sold should be registered with the local authority, and that the register should be open for the inspection of the police. The Commission was also strongly of opinion that “clubs which exist only for the purpose of supplying drink, or only colourably for some other purpose, should be declared absolutely illegal”. When Lord Randolph Churchill brought his licensing scheme before the House of Commons, he incorporated with it clauses for the registration and taxation of clubs, as has already been described in the previous chapter. The Bishop of London’s Bill in 1893 contained similar clauses, but neither measure ever got beyond the initial stages. The Clubs Registration Bill, as amended by a Select Committee of the House of Commons last year, provided (1) that every club (with certain strictly defined exceptions) selling intoxicating liquors on unlicensed premises must be registered; (2) that it shall only be managed in accordance with its registered constitution; and (3) that an annual return shall be made of the members of the club. There were further provisions forbidding the sale of any drink to be taken from the club premises, preventing any person under eighteen years old becoming a member of the club, and limiting the number of honorary members to one for every twenty ordinary members. The Bill applied only to England, and was admitted by its supporters to be miserably inadequate; but it would have been a great improvement, had it passed into law, on the present state of affairs. However, it went the usual way of Bills in that barren Session.