But why should public-houses be what they are? I well remember at Mayence entering a beautiful public hall—it was a rainy night, or the entertainment would have been out of doors—where there was a fine string band playing excellent music. Men, women, and children sat at tables and had ham and bread and cake and beer and coffee, and those who wished to do so smoked. There was no swilling at counters, there was no forced teetotalism, there was no drunkenness; merely domestic liberty for rational enjoyment.
Why cannot there be sufficient free trade in the beer business of this country to allow an individual or, if you prefer it, an enlightened municipality—where such exists—to copy the sane entertainments of our German neighbours? A working man and his wife and children spend their evening listening to the band in a German beer-garden with as little sense of impropriety as Lord and Lady De Vere and the Hon. Gladys De Vere take their lunch at the Ritz, or Alderman and Mrs. Snooks lunch in the French restaurant at the Midland.
But in England these domestic felicities are for the rich alone. The brewers and puritans have given the poor man a mean tippling-house to booze in, and deny him anything better. His wife is looked upon as degraded if she joins him at the only place where he can spend his leisure, and the rich lawgivers put the true stamp on their own invention by enacting that it is an unfit place for little children to enter.
The fact is that the public house should be built in the interests of the public. There seems no great decrease in the desire to drink good ale. It is a national taste, and, if the ale be good, it is probably at least as healthy, or healthier, than drinking tea as tea is brewed in cottage homes. But in the name of liberty and equality, surely if a man wants to drink ale in moderation he should be encouraged to do so in bright, pleasant surroundings, where he can spend his evenings at a moderate cost with his wife and children and meet his friends. He should be allowed to open such a place himself if the municipality will not do it for him, and the more civilised brewers should be assisted and encouraged by the licensing authorities to build big, spacious public houses, where the poor man could obtain similar entertainment to that provided for his wealthier brother.
There is something almost shameless in the way in which the law of licensing is stretched to the uttermost for the rich and drawn to the narrowmost for the poor. One picks up a paper with an account of the latest midnight ball—the gayest event of the season—all in the interests of charity, of course. What has become of that closing time which, if overstepped by the poor, means police court for the criminals and loss of license to the innkeeper? It has been extended, no doubt, by a complacent magistrate, and you can sit down to supper at midnight, and all night long you can refresh yourself at American bars presided over by beautiful ladies of the chorus. One gathers there will be no closing time at all, as breakfasts will be served from three o’clock. In the intervals of the dancing there are to be famous music-hall turns. At some of these fashionable dances valuable prizes are given, at others these fall to lucky ones by some form of lot—not lottery, of course, for that would be against the law, and these entertainments are arranged by eminent leaders of society who are always within the law—well within it.
It would be ill mannered to endeavour to stop so much innocent enjoyment of a class that has so little real pleasure by enforcing the licensing and other laws to interfere with their amusements. On the contrary, we should seek to use their example and better our own licensing circumstances by an appeal to their precedent. If it is good for leaders of society to sing and dance and sup after hours in their public houses, why should not the rest of society be allowed to follow their example and have their own beanfeasts in ample public houses undisturbed by the law? Of course there must be a charity! Give me an extension of license in the Old Kent Road and I will provide plenty of charities and plenty of lads and lasses ready to sing Mr. Adrian Ross’s refrain:
Care has gone to sleep till morning,
Night’s the noon of joy.
For the young people of the poor are just as fond of a spree as those of the rich, and quite as ready to be charitable to the extent of their means after the same fashion.
There is an excellent letter of Charles Kingsley’s written to the “Christian Socialist” some sixty years ago that might well be circulated among licensing benches by the Home Office—though I believe it is considered officially to be bad economy to address printed common sense to the unpaid magistracy. Naturally, autocrats resent or scoff at advice that has no sanction behind it. The teetotal attitude of mind and the quarrels it aroused very properly disgusted Kingsley. He took no pleasure in hearing the water drinkers calling the beer drinkers “flabby, pot-bellied, muddle-headed, disgusting old brutes,” and the beer drinkers retorting on the water drinkers that they were “conceited puritans and manichees and ascetics.” He saw that the quarrel would not do any good to the cause of temperance, and in his honest enthusiasm blurted out the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about his teetotal friends, like the good old Christian warrior that he was.
“On my honour,” he writes, “unless the teetotallers show a more humble, gentle and tolerant spirit than is common among them I shall advise beer drinkers like myself and Mr. Hughes (Tom Brown of the Schooldays) either to flee the country, or if their cloth allows them, which mine does not, prove by self-defence that a man can value his beer, and thank God for it with a good conscience, as tens of thousands do daily and yet feel as tight about the loin and as wiry in the arm as any teetotaller in England. Honestly, I am jesting in earnest. I regard this teetotal movement with extreme dread. I deeply sympathise with the horror of our English drunkenness that produced it. I honour every teetotaller as I honour every man who proves by his action that he possesses high principle and manful self-restraint.... That a man should be a teetotaller rather than a drunkard needs no proof. Also that a man should go about in a sack rather than be a fop and waste time and money on dress. But I think temperance in beer, like temperance in clothes, is at once a more rational and a higher virtue either than sackcloth or water.”