This was true doctrine then and is true doctrine to-day, and the sad fact that it fell on deaf ears and is still but half understood is the reason of our backwardness in licensing reform and the presence of the degrading public house which the law cherishes and protects.
Only the other day in a country town, on the application for a license, the police superintendent objected to the house on the ground of the small bar accommodation. His Grace the Duke, who happened to be in the chair, wanted to know if the proprietor of the house would prepare a plan for enlarging the bar accommodation. What could the proprietor do? The police wanted to herd the drinkers into a bar so that they could pop their heads in and see them all at once without any trouble, the bench wanted to do what the police wanted them to do. The interests of the poor, the cause of temperance, the betterment of the social life of the people were as irrelevant to the case as the flowers that bloom in the spring.
At many a licensing session, too, you will listen to solemn warnings by the superintendent of police against the public being allowed to amuse themselves with penny-in-the-slot machines or gramophones or parlour quoits or the like. Amusement is regarded with a natural horror by the puritan, and the friends of the brewer see in it a dangerous alternative to the duty of the working man to drink. One police authority threatened the license holders “that if they continued to allow these machines to be used in their licensed premises they did so at the risk of prosecution for allowing gaming.” The gaming laws of England with their wholesale permission of gambling in one place and their retail persecution of gambling in another place, and their incapacity to know when a place is not a place or how otherwise, are a public laughing stock, but it is a grievous thing that they should be dragged out to drive a little harmless amusement out of the dingy tavern which is the only public institution the poor man has for rest and recreation.
As a matter of fact, these machines, if they are used for gambling, are generally used to see who shall pay for drinks. In some bars in foreign countries a dice-box is always handy for this purpose. Three or four friends come in and throw, the loser pays for drinks, and all are satisfied, and having had their drink they go. I am not upholding the custom as ideal, but I see little harm in it. In England, if three or four enter a public house, the etiquette in many places is for one to stand drinks, and for the rest in turn to offer to stand another round—an offer seldom refused—and for the rounds to continue until each has stood his corner. I would not go so far as to insist on a compulsory dice-box in every bar, but I fancy on the whole that it is an agent of temperance.
Every one who has given any thought to temperance as opposed to teetotalism, is agreed that what is wanted is the gradual elimination of bars and counters and the substitution of chairs and tables and big open rooms. In these must be provided tea, coffee, and all the usual lighter refreshments that you find in the better-class restaurants and hotels. In a big West End hotel you find every afternoon that the lounge is laid out for afternoon tea. I do not see why a working man and his wife should not have their tea in a lounge in their public house. I cannot understand why, if two friends after a day in the workshop want to have a friendly chat, they cannot find an institution where one can have his cup of tea and a muffin, and the other his glass of ale and a sandwich, and both sit at one table in a spacious room with comfortable surroundings, and if they do not heartily dislike it a gramophone to play tunes to them. That is impossible of attainment as the law now stands. If a millionaire was to offer to build in Manchester a dozen working-men’s cafés on the continental plan where any decent citizen could be pleased to take his wife and children, as our French and German neighbours do, the brewers, the teetotallers, the police, the licensing magistrates and the law would see that it was not permitted.
And yet we know by experiment that in proper surroundings, reasonable facilities for refreshment do not lead to drunkenness. In the Manchester Exhibition of 1887, it being a wonderfully fine summer, and licenses having been freely given for the occasion, there was an opportunity of testing whether under proper conditions opportunity led to excess. I never heard that it did. In the Franco-British Exhibition where reasonable facilities of refreshment were also given, it is said—and I have no doubt truly said—that though eight or nine million visitors passed through the turnstiles, yet there was not a single case of drunkenness.
The problem is really a simple one, if we could only get administrators and legislators, but especially the former, to look at it in the interest of the man in the street. To the big brewery company beer is an effluent, and the public house is the conduit pipe through which they pour it into the public stomach. They have obviously no interest in ideal public houses—and why should they? They are business men on business bent. The teetotallers, on the other hand, regard the drinking of beer as a sin, and any public house as the house of the Devil. Why should they help the Devil to make his house sweet and attractive, and make the path easier for the poor sinner who thirsts after beer? At present the average licensing bench consists of “half and half”—to use a trade term—of these elements. If there happen to be a few cranks on the bench who share the feather-headed notions set down in this chapter, they can always be out-voted by a combination of brewer and teetotaller. And for my part I think we shall stick to our glorious institution of the “tied-house” just as long as the working man intends to allow us and no longer.
When reformed public houses are taken up by the men who use the public house, and when labour demands something better, the demand will be met. For the teetotaller is nothing if not political, and when he sees where the votes are, and not before, he will begin to see the error of his ways.
Meanwhile it will do him no harm to study the statistics such as they are, and discover that the number of licenses in a district has nothing to do with the amount of drunkenness therein, and to look back on the past history of the public house and recognise that he has for many years been the friend and ally of the undesirable brewer. The good citizen’s policy should be the provision of pure ale in wholesome surroundings, thereby freeing the working class from the tyranny of the public house. To the teetotallers who hinder such a policy I can only repeat Charles Kingsley’s message: “And I solemnly warn those who try to prevent it that they are, with whatsoever good intentions, simply doing the Devil’s work.”