The Northern Daily Times.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1853-11-09 00:00:00

EVILS 01? THE LICENSING SYSTEM.

THE present system of Public-house licenses
having been so much discussed of late, in con-
nexion with the town of Liverpool, the following
article on the question, which appears in the
Morning Chronicle of yesterday, will doubtlessly be
interesting to our readers :

" If the Licensing System were conducted with perfect
purity and fairness, instead of being, as it notoriously is, the
instrument of the most shameful jobbery and partiality—if
it were as consistent with the reasonable liberty of the sub-
ject as it is utterly repugnant to all sound economical and
social principles—it would still be open to grave objection.
The grounds on which it was originally justified were two-
fold—the protection of the public against adulterated liquors
and short measures, and the interposition of a check upon
the indulgence of vicious propensities which find in some
particular trades unusual facilities for their gratification.
How far the former end has been attained—or rather, how
far any attempt is ever made to attain it—is a question
which may be left to the consumers of the different beverages
which the licensed victualler dispenses, and for which such
admirable recipes are given in a certain manual which is in
very general circulation among them. As to the magis-
trates' license operating as a restraint on drunkenness and
other immoralities, there is good reason for believing that
it has the directly opposite effect. The practice of selling
licenses,' says Mr. Robertson Gladstone, of Liverpool, has a
very injurious effect, inasmuch as, if a party having a license
desires, after a certain number of years, to retire from trade,
he knows very well, if he can show that he draws a certain
number of casks of beer, or a certain quantity of spirits, and
so on, the license will sell for a considerable rice;p and
licenses are very commonly bought and sold.' If the trade
were open, a publican would have no other motive for en-
couraging excessive drinking than the desire to earn a profit
upon the commodity consumed; and that desire might, in
some measure,
.be counteracted by the fear of attracting
rivals to his neighbourhood, and the police to his doors. But
as a license confers a monopoly, the dread of competition is
unfelt ; and the landlord's anxiety to increase the value of
the goodwill of the concern—which, of course, rises with
the amount of business done—acts as a strong incentive in
addition to the hope of immediate profit, for stimulating the
consumption of intoxicating liquors.
"But even if the system really tended to restrain vice, it
would still labour under other fatal defects. In the first
place, it does not so much as pretend to deal with more than
one of the many trodeq which afford scope for the evils
against which it is directed. There are seven or eight dif-
ferent branches of business which, however
innocent per se,
unquestionably offer facilities for many kinds of immorality.
Sir R. Mayne, the Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan
Police, mentioned, in his evidence before the select committee
of last session, not only the public-house, but also the music
and dancing room, the billiard-room, the beer-shop, the
wine-room, the coffee-shop, the eating-house, and the shell-
fish shop, as places of public entertainment, which especi-
ally call for the control of the State. With the last three,
however, the law does not, practically speaking, in any way
interfere. The other five it treats in as many different
modes. Any freeman of the Vintners' Company is at liberty
to open a wine shop, not only without a magistrates' license,
but without being subject to police surveillance , and more
than one house might be mentioned, in the neigbourhood of
the theatres, where the disorerly and vicious congregate,
night after night, with perfect impunity. " The evils in
some of these houses, " says Sir R. Main, " are very great,
by the assemblage of young men half drunk, and women,
and the seduction from those to the gaming-houses. I
thought it a great evil, and took steps to check it, but I
found I could not do it." Billiard-rooms, and music and
dancing rooms, are not permitted without the license of the
magistrates : and this is granted under totally different con-
ditions in the two cases—the former class of houses being
repuired to close at one p.m., and not to open till eight ;
whilst the latter are prohibited from commencing their en-
tertainments before five p.m. Beer-houses are conducted
under the license of the Excise, which is conferred, as a
matter of course, on every person who produces a certificate
of good character, signed by half-a-dozen rate payers. They
are bound to close at midnight, but the sale of beer is in
many instances continued an hour later, under the shelter
of a billiard-table license. Finally, no public-house can be
opened without the license of the magistrates. The police
may enter, at all times of the day or night, into the two
last-mentioned establishments, but they have no control
whatever over any of the others.
"It is obvious. therefore, that, even if the licensing
system were in all other respects free from objection, it
would be open to the charge of being but a very partial
remedy for wide-spread evils. But it is, in truth, funda-
mentally vicious in principle. An age Sir ignorant of the
general laws of commerce as that of the Tuports may well
have imagined that vice was to be checked by restricting
competition in those trades which gave opportunities for its
indulgence ; and the error may be the more readily excused,
as the only effectual instrument for attaining the end in
view—viz., a police force—did not then exist. But a gene-
ration which has seen the last rags of Protectionism dragged
through the mire by its own disciples, cannot be expected to
tolerate much longer such antiquated notions upon the sub-
ject, If the traffic in gin and brandy is injurious to the
nation, it ought to be prohibited altogether, as it is in
Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Rhode Island ; but if
' ark th"`-ailit" a,pla'orfaV2

all who may.

in it. To place the trade exclusively in the hands of those
persons who may chance to find favor in the eyes of a bench
of justices tends only to increase the rate of profit, and by no
means diminishes the facilities for getting drunk. These
will always exist—be it said with deference to Mr. Pownall,
the chairman of the Middlesex magistrates—so long as the
monopolists possess the means of accommodating the sots of
the district.

" Inebriety ought to be dealt with like every other offence.
Means should be taken to restrain and to punish the offender;
but to expect to put down drunkenness by restricting the
number of houses where intoxicating liquors may be pur-
chased,lis about as reasonable aslto propose to check gambling
in the stock or share market by limitmg the business of the
broker and jobber, as is the case in Paris, to a few persons.
If, indeed, the men entrusted with the working of the system
approximated to the American plan of total prohibition, by
only licensing public-houses in remote and, inconvenient
localities, indolence might sometimes prevail over the love
of tippling. The drunkard might resign himself to the
horrors of sobriety, if he could not attain his seventh heaven
without walking some miles for it. But this is precisely
what the worshipful bench carefully avoid. They profess to
study the wants of the neighbourhood.' Every spot where
human habitations arise is readily endowed with a public-
house, unless the nearest existing establishment be within a
convenient distance. The magistrates take care that the
drunkard shall not be subjected to the inconvenience of
having to travel far for his daily consolation ; but, having
provided him with one public-house, they deny him the
luxury of another. They do not discourage him from drink-
ing gin—they merely require him to drink the liquid of A's
manufacture out of B's glasses, instead of suffering him to
vary his compotations by sometimes trying the dewdrops
of X's still from the measure of Y. In a word, what their
worships object to is, inconstancy in the bestowal of his
patronage, not indulgence in his degrading propensity. But
this is only one of the many curiosities of the licensing
system."