Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman

by I. Giberne Sieveking

The misery which husband can inflict on wife, or wife on husband, by drunkenness, has led many Yankees further, and—to our shame—we have as yet refused to learn from them. If a wife (with certain legal formalities) forbid the drinkshops to supply her husband, this should be of the same avail, as if the husband were convicted of drunkenness before a magistrate. Of course a husband ought to have the same right against a wife, and either parent against a son or daughter under age. Such an enactment, as it seems to me, ought to be at once passed, as a law for all the Queen's realms, not as matter for local option. Passed over the heads of existing magistrates, it would remain valid over whatever authority may succeed them.

This is no place to dwell on any details of horrors inflicted on the country by the present imbecile control. Of course, it is far better than the free trade in drink, towards which Liverpool twenty years back took a long stride, with results most wretched and justly repented of. How deadly is now the propensity of the country, will sufficiently appear from an experience of the late Sir Titus Salt in his little kingdom of Saltaire.

For a single year he made trial of granting to four select shops a licence to supply table beer in bottles, delivered at the houses in quantity proportioned to the number of inmates;—a more severe limitation than any previously heard of. Yet in the course of some months evil grew up and multiplied. Something stronger than table beer (apparently) had been substituted. The liquor was smuggled into the works. Disobedience and disorders arose; and at length a deputation of his own men complained to him that their women at home were getting too much of the drink. At the year's end he cancelled the licences, and to the general content and benefit restored absolute prohibition. Nothing short of this extinguishes the unnatural taste. Female drunkenness is a new vice, at least in any but the most debased of the sex: yet alas! courtly physicians now tell us that it has invaded the boudoirs of great ladies. Such has been the mischief of Confectioners' and Grocers' Licences.

Unsatisfactory as has been the control of the drink trade by the magistrates, their neglect has never been resented in higher quarters, ever since, by gift of the Excise, Parliament made the Exchequer a sleeping partner in the gains of the Drink Trade. The Queen's Exchequer has hence a revenue of about thirty-three millions a year, of which probably two-thirds, say twenty-two millions, is from excess: a formidable sum as hush-money. No earnest reformer expects the leopard to change his spots. A transference of power is claimed, chiefly under the title of Local Option. To give the power to town councils has been proved wholly insufficient in Scotland; though the Right Hon. John Bright seems obstinately to shut eyes and ears to the fact.

Again and again in crowded meetings the Resolution has been affirmed: "The people who suffer by the trade ought to have a veto against it."—Those who seem resolved to oppose every scheme which seeks to break down and restrict this horrible vice, tauntingly reply, that this measure would ensure its continuance in its worst centres. They do but show their own unwisdom herein. The Publicans know far better, and they avow, there is nothing they so much dread as local option. In Maine itself, a State frightfully drunken in the first half of the century, the opponents of Neal Dow in the State Legislature scornfully allowed him to carry a Bill which gave to each parish Permission to accept his measure as law. They expected that the drunkards would outvote it: but to their discomfiture found that the drunkards were glad of his law, and nailed it firm. Let all sound-hearted Englishmen trust our suffering population to use their own remedy. Under Local Option we now embrace two systems which have been already discussed in Parliament—that of Sir Wilfrid Lawson, and that upon the outlines of Mr. Joseph Cowen's Bill.

Personally I yield to Sir Wilfrid Lawson the highest honour. Beyond all other men he is the hero in this long battle. If I account his Bill defective, he will not blame me: for in its original form, which he would be glad to carry, it closely resembled the Maine Law, and superseded the Magistrates. He has simplified it by making it only a half-measure. After Parliament has been teazed by the drink question for more than twenty-five years (one might almost say, ever since 1834), after candidates at every election have been made anxious by it, we must calculate that all public men will desire to make a final settlement and get rid of the topic in Parliament. But Sir Wilfrid's Bill, whatever its other merits (and I think them great), will not set Parliament free. For so soon as any district adopts his permission to stop the Drink Trade, an outcry must arise from local medical men and chemists and varnishers, demanding new shops for their needs: and intense jealousy will follow, lest the new sellers, though called chemists or grocers or oilmen, presently become purveyors of drink; hence a fresh struggle must continue in our overworked Legislature concerning the new and necessary regulations. Sir Wilfrid's half-measure supersedes neither the Magistrates nor the Parliament, though for two hundred years the Nation has suffered through the laxity of both. Surely we chiefly need real Provincial Legislatures, and, until we get them, Local Folk Motes and Local Elective Boards are our best substitutes.

This is the other and the complete measure: yet something remains to be said on it. The great evil is, that by reason of competition, a trade cannot live, except by pushing its sales. The Americans have wisely seen that the necessary sales must be effected by Agents publicly appointed, with a fixed salary and nothing to gain by an increase of sales. Such Agents must receive public instructions. This was, in fact, Sir Wilfrid's original scheme, only that it forbad absolutely the selling wine or beer for drink, unless by medical order; and the last condition would involve in Parliament endless contention. It is simpler, and I think far better, to give to an Elective Board a general free discretion. Parliament might indeed dictate that sales should go on through a public officer only.

I, for one, should rejoice in this. But the most eager teetotaller will not hope that in the present generation any English Parliament will be more severe against a wine-loving gentry, and more dictatorial to medical men, than is the law of Maine. If therefore it did command that sales should be without gain, it certainly would not allow an entire prohibition of selling alcohol as beverage to be imposed on the Agent for sale. It is not so in Maine; and this fact occasioned Mr. Plimsoll's stupendous blunder, who declared in Parliament that the Maine Law was a dead letter in Maine itself. The fact on which he built this outrageously false assertion was that when Mr. Plimsoll asked for Whiskey, the Agent instantly sold it to him without a moment's hesitation. But why? "Because he knew that Mr. Plimsoll was an English M.P. and a teetotaller."