The Sun.
London, England, 1828-08-08 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

Our readers have seen within this day or two
reports of certain proceedings at Bow-street and
in the City relative to the licensing of hotels.
It is known to every body that those houses for
the accommodation of strangers, which bear the
name of " hotel" in contradistinction to " coffee-
house," are the only class of London inn at
which individuals or families who wish to be
comfortable would ever think of sleeping. It is
equally notorious, that if the inmates of an hotel
had not the opportunity of eating and drinking,
as well as sleeping there, they would, more espe-
cially in the case of families, be driven to such
inconvenience as must force the hotel-keeper to
shut up his doors, and to turn over his guests to
some of the fraternity of " licensed victuallers,—
that is to say, the tavern-keepers of the metro-
polis, where, generally speaking, every descrip-
tion of noise and bustle, besides port and gin,
are sold for a considerable profit, but where a
night's rest, in a tranquil apartment, is, from the
nature of things, and at any price, unattain-
able. The hotels thus necessary to the en-
joyment, we had almost said to the existence, of
respectable persons coming for a few days to
London, went on for a number of years in the
practice of supplying their company with wines,
&c. under licenses from the Board of Excise.
Informers, however, being " abroad," and vic-
tuallers licensed by the Justices, and dependent
osi the brewers, being at hand to encourage
them, a flaw was a short time ago discovered in
the legality of the Excise license, as relating to
hotel-keepers, which brought that whole body,
perhaps the most reputable in the business, un-
der the penalty of an Act of Parliament 35
Geo. 111. The hotel-keepers betook themselves
for redress to Government, which promptly en-
deavoured to relieve them, and an Act was passed
at a late period of the last Session, authorizing
Magistrates to take the place of the Excise Board,
in issuing licenses to the keepers of hotels for
the sale oof exciseable liquors. Under these cir-
cumstances, it appears that certain keepers of ho-
tels have applied to the wisdom of Bow-street, as
also of the city, to enable them to carry on the
same hotel business in which they had been en-
gaged before the passing of the Act, and before
the informers and alehouse-keepers had dragged
op the Act of Geo. 111. to ruin them. Now the
Act of last Session, he it remembered, was to
be an Act of relic:f to the hotel-keepers. That
was the declared object and purview of the Sta-
tute ; it was to be an Act protective of hotels.
Not so, however, has it been construed by the
sages of the police-office and the Mansion-house.
If monopoly has no friends at the Excise board,
that it has them elsewhere seems manifest
enough : if the big brewers were not so strong at
Westminster as to throw out two Acts of Par-
liament in the same Session, they are at least in
force sufficient to frustrate, not a thousand miles'
from Westminster, the beneficial operation of
the Statute upon those for whose behalf it was
intended. One potentate of the police bench
understood himself to sit there for no other pur-
pose, in plain English, than to see that the in-
terests of the licensed victuallers—i.e. of the
mighty porter brewers—received no harm. Mo-
nopoly for ever ! this is your golden age. The
hotel-keepers and their families are nothing, the
spirit of the Act of Parliament less than nothing
—and as for the public, what care we for that,
so the publican, and his master the vat-man,
may continue to plunder and poison us as they
Tike ?—Tinzes.
Mr. O'Connell has announced that it is his
intention to agitate a question of rather a delicate
nature with the aristocracy of this country. The
Borough of Tralee is the property of the Denny
Family, and has ever since the Union been re-
gularly bought and sold. " In the year 1792
(says Mr. O'Connell), this Borough was settled
in marriage, and vested in two trustees—one of
them a Judge of the land. The Representa-
tion was regularly sold for money, and settled on
the younger children ; it was made a regular
article of traffic, and settled on the unborn pro-
geny of the marriage, which was then to take
place. If East Retford should be disfranchised,
because a considerable number of the constitu-
ents took a few pounds for their votes, why
should not Tralee be treated in the same man-
ner, when it was sold wholesale ? Why should
not the representation be given to the inhabi-
tants of Tralee ? It is one of the most rising
towns in Ireland. More houses have with-
in the last two years and a half been erect-
ed in Tralee, than perhaps in any other
town in this country. Its commerce, too,
has increased wonderfully ; and its exports hare
in a short time amounted from ten or twelve
thousand pounds, to one hundred and twenty
thousand pounds yearly. It is a most rising
town ; and when the case comes before Parlia-
moat, there can be little joubt that the Corpo-
ration most forfeit its Charter, They have only
to examine Judge Day, one of the Donny family,
and Mr. Latouehe, the hanker, and Parliament
will soon learn how many pounds, shillings, and
pence have been paid fiar this place since the
pence
This is one of the most ticklish cases
which has yet presented itself. Only think of
the precedent of calling boroughmongers to ac-
count for the use they make of their property !
It is quite a distinct thing, whatever Mr.O'Con-
nen may say, to sell a single vote and to sell a
whole borough ; because the proprietors of bo-
roughs have an interest that those who sell single
votes should be punished, as infringing on their
own monopoly, but have an equally strong in-
terest that the sale of boroughs should be held
sacred. They who snake th'el4w have the power
of determining what is right and why is wrone. ;
and the proprietors of boroughs, having the power
to make the law, would be tools indeed to make
a law, according to which they should themselves
When a late Speaker
he found in the wrong,
of the House of Commons, now a Peer, de_
dared in his place, that 4‘ the sale of seats
degrades and debases the habits of the higher
,ranks of life, who confess their own sense of the
nature of these transactions by the concealment
with which they seek to cover them ; it taints
,and contaminates the general character of Par-
liament.
Fraud, force, corrupt practices, and
undue influence of any sort by which the freedom
of election is controlled, have been reprobated
in all ages lt is for us, who have
before us such flagrant proofs that the traffic in
seats has broken through the existing checks, to
put it down by a new law. This is about as
much to the purpose, as if Messrs. Cauty and
Company,
So honourably mentioned
in
the
Police Report as among the most respectable
of the fences or negotiators, should declare
that negociating, with thieves ought to he put •
doWn by a new law. What ! the men that profit
by a thing put it down ? 0 no ; when negocia-
tors have the power to make laws, they will—
like their types, the Boroughmongers—take
especial care that negociations be properly pro-
tected. Nothing is wrong that is safe ; for the
law determines what is just and what is poi ;

and we know who determines what the law should
be. Men like the Nobleman, from whose speech
we have quoted, do much mischief. They per-
plex and confound plain people, by filling their
heads with the notion that what the Legislature
allows can be unjust. A Legislature of Land-
holders, according to him, might act unjustly in
making laws to tax the other classes for the be-
nefit of the landed interest—a Legislature of
Borough Proprietors and nominees might also
act unjustly in selling and buying seats. We
expect to see the day when all this sophistry
shall be put down, and when all good things
shall be made the most of without controversy
or dispute—when a Bishopric shall be sold in
the market as openly as a Borough or a Bullock.
—Morning Chro 11 ide.

The question which is now agitating both be-
fore the Magistrates of London and Westmin-
ster, as to licensing certain hotels to sell excise-.
able liquors, forms a tolerable practical commen-
tary on the inutility and injustice of the licensing
system altogether. It is amusing enough to see
from one end of the town to the other, houses
year after year licensed and re-licensed, which
are known to be nothing better than mere dens
of thieves (or, as cant language has it, flash-
houses) ; yet, when the Legislature, wisely and
humanely intending at once to increase public
accommodation, and screen an important class
of men—the coffee-house and hotel-keepers—
from the gripe of informers, passes an Act, call-
ing upon the Magistrates to license these persons
for the remainder of the year, every fastidious
quibble and subterfuge seems to be recurred to,
to defeat the objects which Parliament had in
view. Publicans, we believe, have taken a very
unnecessary alarm upon this occasion ; at least
they mistake the shadow for the substance,
and are pursuing an► imaginary evil while
they lose sight of the real one. It is not
the small quantity of porter which would
be retailed in all the hotels in London, were
they each to draw their own, which can affect
them one hundred fold so much as the bad
quality of the article which is forced upon them
by the brewers, who, we have no doubt, are at
the bottom of the opposition which is raised to
the present Act. But the public have an inte-
rest in this matter quite independent of any of
these parties, and that, we humbly conceive, is
the interest to which the Magistrates should
look. Nothing seems more absurd than that
those whose business it is to provide a man with
a dinner may not sell him a draught of beer to
drink with it ; yet that has been the situation of
the hotel and coffee-house keepers in the metro-
, polis. Suppose a man, who is staying in town
for pleasure or business, at one of the many
houses of this description, coining home late in
the evening and asldng for a glass of beer to
quench his thirst, he must be told by the waiter,
" Sir, we are not allowed to sell beer, and it
is too late to send to the public-house." As
eating and drinking go together, nothing is
more obvious than that the sale of both eatables
and drinkables should be permitted, if not,
indeed, encouraged, under the same roof: To
this our wise licensing system has hitherto op-
posed a barrier; but no sooner are the eyes of
the Legislature opened to the impolicy and in-
justice, but its views are attempted to be frus-
trated, because some Alderman has not been
consulted as to where a man shall dine, or for
fear the vested interests in the Strand may suffer
by a new corner. This, we contend, is all
beside the Magistrate's duty upon the occasion.
All that he has to do is to take care that the
public peace is net broken, or the public morals
infected, by what he does, or what he can prevent ;
who gets rich or who becomes poor, by carrying
on a trade in beer, should be of no more conse-
quence to him than if' the trade where one in
calico or potatoes.—Morning Herald.

LICENSING HOTELS IN THE CITY.

(CONCLUDED FROM Ot R PAPER OF YESTRRDAI )
EUROPEAN HOTEL, MANSION-HOUSE-STREET.

Mr. BARRY applied on behalf of Abraham Francis
and William James Cochrane, for a license similar
to the one last applied for, for a house belonging to
the applicants, called the European Hotel, situate in
Mansion-house-street, immediately opposite to the
Mansion-house. The facts of the case were similar
to the last ; but the matter was cut short, in conse-
quence of an objection taken by Mr. Adolphus,"upon
the evidence of the applicant himself, that the house
was only opened in May last, and consequently could
not possibly come within the Statute, which only
contemplated Louses that had been used as hotels
previous to the Ist January. The application was,
of course, dismissed.