And the whole attitude of mind of the English Pharisee towards the inn and the tavern is the most incomprehensible affair to the average citizen. One would have thought that an endeavour would be made to have the inn a place of cleanliness, beauty, and good repute, where relaxation and bright amusement and music might be a God-send to hard-working people. But generations of magistrates have decreed that the workers are to have their drink surrounded by every discomfort. Magnificent hotels and restaurants with music and dancing are only for the rich. All this is, of course, done in the great cause of temperance, and as Mr. Balfour said, “love of temperance is the polite name for hatred of the publican.” In the upper and middle classes the altered manners of the day in relation to strong drink are not due to shutting down public-houses and degrading those that are left open. Legislation is never likely to achieve any great moral
reform, nor are the licensing magistrates, as a rule, administrators of much sweetness or great light.
Had they been so I think they would have noticed that in records of English habits and English character the inn stands for nearly as much as the church in the social life of the people. Those of us who have plenty of house room do not quite recognise how an inn may be the one possible meeting-place for friends in hours of recreation. How shortsighted, then, to forbid its expansion, to make it uncomfortable and degrading. In the literature of our country the inn is very rarely spoken of with disrespect. It were easy to quote passage after passage, from the holiest literature to the lightest, of the high place that the inn and what it represents occupies in the minds of the best Englishmen. Licensing magistrates should overhaul their Bibles for the right references, and “when found, turn the leaf down.” Doctor Johnson puts it in a phrase when he says: “No, sir; there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.” He then repeated with great emotion Shenstone’s lines. The last verse is well remembered:
Whoe’er has travelled life’s dull round,
Where’er his stages may have been,
May sigh to think he still has found
The warmest welcome at an inn.
The spirit of freedom and social comfort that runs through all the English writing about inns is a good thing to foster in itself. And in whose interest
is it suppressed? Not in the present-day interests of the working man, but at the behest of the Pharisees, who have added a commandment of their own, “Thou shalt not permit alcohol,” and who believe that they can by associating drink with degradation and discomfort put an end to its use. It was Charles Kingsley who solemnly warned the teetotalers that they were “simply doing the devil’s work.” As he said with much foresight and wisdom, “I dread the spirit of teetotalism, because it will beget that subtlest of sins, spiritual pride and Pharisaism. Its founders, like the first founders of every ascetism may be, and as far as I have conversed with them are, pure, humble, and self-denying men. So were the Fakeers, the first Mohammedan ascetics, the first monks, the first Quakers … but after a few generations the self-avenging Nemesis comes, the evil spirit drops his mask and appears as Pharisaism.”
But if he could have lived to see the work of the licensing benches of to-day, how they make it daily more impossible to run an inn or tavern on right lines, bright, respectable, large, airy, and clean, with all reasonable recreations for its patrons, Kingsley would have been able to give the Evil One his due for the work of his adherents. Probably the boldest and best solution of our difficulties would be Free Trade, a high rateable value of premises and reasonable police supervision. There could not, one would think, be a better field for practising Free Trade principles—if you really believe in them—than in the trade of our national beverage.