10. The repeal of all the duties on tea, coffee, chocolate, and sugar.
11. Your Committee, in conclusion, are of opinion that as the ancient and avowed object of licensing the sale of intoxicating liquors is to supply a supposed public want, without detriment to the public welfare, a legal power of restraining the issue or renewal of licences should be placed in the hands of the persons most deeply interested and affected—namely, the inhabitants themselves—who are entitled to protection from the injurious consequences of the present system. Such a power would, in effect, secure to the districts, willing to exercise it, the advantages now enjoyed by the numerous parishes in the Province of Canterbury, where, according to reports furnished to your Committee, owing to the influence of the landowner, no sale of intoxicating liquors is licensed.
Few, it may be believed, are cognisant of the fact that there are at this time within the Province of Canterbury, more than one thousand parishes in which there is neither public-house nor beer-shop; and where, in consequence of the absence of these inducements to crime and pauperism, the intelligence, morality and comfort of the people are such as the friends of temperance would have anticipated.
The non-legislative recommendations urge the removal of benefit clubs from taverns, the discontinuance of wage-payment in them, and the providing of ample and varied counter-attractions.
Thus much for legislation, and for the impulses that stimulate thereunto. Much has been written both for and against restriction. Violently opposed to it was Mr. John Stuart Mill, who may well claim to be the mouthpiece of the adversaries of prohibition. Speaking on the laws against intemperance in his Essay on Liberty, he remarks:—
Under the name of preventing intemperance, the people of one English colony, and of nearly half the United States, have been interdicted by law from making any use whatever of fermented drinks, except for medical purposes; for prohibition of their sale is, in fact, as it is intended to be, prohibition of their use. And though the impracticability of executing the law has caused its repeal in several of the states which had adopted it, including the one from which it derives its name, an attempt has notwithstanding been commenced, and is prosecuted with considerable zeal by many of the professed philanthropists, to agitate for a similar law in this country. The association, or ‘Alliance,’ as it terms itself, which has been formed for this purpose, has acquired some notoriety through the publicity given to a correspondence between its secretary and one of the very few English public men who hold that a politician’s opinions ought to be founded on principles. Lord Stanley’s share in this correspondence is calculated to strengthen the hopes already built on him, by those who know how rare such qualities as are manifested in some of his public appearances, unhappily are among those who figure in political life. The organ of the Alliance, who would ‘deeply deplore the recognition of any principle which could be wrested to justify bigotry and persecution,’ undertakes to point out the ‘broad and impassable barrier’ which divides such principles from those of the association. ‘All matters relating to thought, opinion, conscience, appear to me,’ he says, ‘to be without the sphere of legislation; all pertaining to social act, habit, relation, subject only to a discretionary power vested in the state itself, and not in the individual to be within it.’ No mention is made of a third class, different from either of these—namely, acts and habits which are not social, but individual—although it is to this class, surely, that the act of drinking fermented liquors belongs. Selling fermented liquors, however, is trading, and trading is a social act. But the infringement complained of is not on the liberty of the seller, but on that of the buyer and consumer; since the state might just as well forbid him to drink wine, as purposely make it impossible for him to obtain it. The secretary, however, says: ‘I claim, as a citizen, a right to legislate whenever my social rights are invaded by the social act of another.’ And now for the definition of these ‘social rights.’ ‘If anything invades my social rights, certainly the traffic in strong drink does. It destroys my primary right of security, by constantly creating and stimulating social disorder. It invades my right of equality, by deriving a profit from the creation of a misery I am taxed to support. It impedes my right to free moral and intellectual development, by surrounding my path with dangers, and by weakening and demoralising society from which I have a right to claim mutual aid and intercourse.’ A theory of ‘social rights,’ the like of which probably never before found its way into distinct language; being nothing short of this, that it is the absolute social right of every individual, that every other individual shall act in every respect exactly as he ought; that whosoever fails thereof in the smallest particular, violates my social right, and entitles me to demand from the legislature the removal of the grievance. So monstrous a principle is far more dangerous than any single interference with liberty; there is no violation of liberty which it would not justify; it acknowledges no right to any freedom whatever, except, perhaps, to that of holding opinions in secret, without ever disclosing them; for the moment, an opinion, which I consider noxious, passes any one’s lips, it invades all the ‘social rights’ attributed to me by the Alliance. The doctrine ascribes to all mankind a vested interest in each other’s moral, intellectual, and even physical perfection, to be defined by each claimant according to his own standard.
Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson, from another point of view, and looking at the probable effects of restraint, makes the following remarkable observation:—
Obedience to his genius is a man’s only liberating influence. We wish to escape from subjection, and a sense of inferiority—and we make self-denying ordinances, we drink water, we eat grass, we refuse the laws, we go to jail: it is all in vain; only by obedience to his genius, only by the freest activity in the way constitutional to him, does an angel seem to arise before a man, and lead him by the hand out of all the wards of the prison.[241]
And it was from deep conviction, and not as a flippant apophthegm, that Bishop Magee pronounced that he preferred to see England free, to England sober.
Yet Mr. Augustus Sala, a man of ample observation and reflection, thought otherwise. He says:—