LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.

[Letters of the length of one of our leading paragraphs are Toften more read, and therefore more effective, than those which fill treble the space.]

NATIONALIZATION AND THE LIQUOR TRADE. f.To THE EDITOR or THE "SPECTAT02."3 Sue—I am glad Mr. Batty realizes the inappropriateness of his comparison between coal and drink, and having secured that admission it is not •necessary to say more. I leave Mr. Batty to discuss with Mr. Theodore Noild the analogy which he draws between " selling drink " and " waging war," only noting that at the moment when we ace seeking to disestablish the " waging of war " it is suggested that we • should instal, as an integral part of our State organization, the " selling of drink." The, greater part of Mr. Batty's letter does not require .comment; it is merely Mr. Batty's version of history; but I -must enter au emphatic protest against his remark that " once more the Alliance Secretary sneers at the beneficent operations ;of the Liquor Control Board." The charge is untrue, and untrue to Mr. Batty's knowledge. I do not agree •with the Board's Carlisle policy; even Lord D'Abernon himself says : " I doubt if similar results could be obtained if the same system were extended to the whole country. Great caution ;should be observed in arguing from the particular to the ;general." But no one has more frankly, in Press or on platform, expressed his appreciation of the value of the Board's ;general restrictions than the " Alliance Secretary."

Mr. Betty's reference to Russia is singularly infelicitous. The Government might put a " skull and cross-bones" on every bottle of vodka, but by offering, and indeed, under financial stress, pressing it upon the people, the 'Government gave the article a testimonial which was far more influential than the label was deterring. It is a matter of history that under the Government monopoly things went from bad to worse until at last the Tsar, following a strong public demand, issued a Rescript in which, after deploring the drink-caused evils which he had seen with his own eyes, he stated that " we cannot make our fiscal prosperity dependenteupon the destruction of the spiritual and economic -powers of many of my subjects."

Mr. Batty dislikes my quoting Mr. Asquith's statement that the liquor traffic " was a business the owning and carrying on of which as a business the State should not touch with its finger-tips." But Mr. Asquith really knows a little about the subject; ho was the author of the greatest Temperance measure that has ever passed through the House of Commons —a measure which, but for the House of Lords, would in two years' time have given us the right of Local Veto, and an early prospect of deliverance from the Trade; and his judgment counts for a good deal.

Despite what Mr. Batty now says, there is 'a very real

difference between the present attitude of the State to the liquor traffic and the position which would arise under nationalization.

"It is surely a very different thing to fine, tax, penalize, or regulate a traffic than to embark upon and undertake its management yourself. When the Government exacts from licences the monopoly value it is not altering the moral position one whit. It is merely exacting a larger and more adequate fine from those who, of their own volition and upon their own pereonal responsibility, enter this miserable business."

That, at any rate, was Mr. Batty's view in 1908. The brewer, brewer's drayman, distiller, publican, barman, wine and spirit merchant, &c., are not at present "Civil Servants," wearing, the King's uniform; the casks do not bear the Royal Arms; nor is the " King's Head " the official public-house sign. It is idle for Mr. Batty to speak of the nationalized Drink Trade as " a small body of disinterested officials." The number of persons directly employed (however great the economies under Government management?) must run into hundreds of thousands, especially if, as some of your correspondents seem to suggest, the State is to be the great caterer not merely for drink but for amusements. Mr. Batty's reference to Henry Ward Beecher is strangely inappropriate. If Mr. Ward Beecher declared that " slavery was never beaten until the political power of the slave-holders was broken," he spoke truly; but—that power was broken by a straight and bitter fight, and not by buying up the slaves and working them, even under "disinterested officials," for the national gain. The reformer can never " dodge " this fight; and under nationalization there will still be " the old foes under new faces," only with new weapons forged for them by the nationalizers.

Mr. Batty charges me with " avoiding the crucial issue of compensation." I thought I had made my position clear. I contend that the liquor traffic has no legal or moral claim to compensation by the taxpayer if the nation or the locality decides to get rid of. it. The Parliament of 1904 had no power to bargain away the public health and morals, and the people themselves cannot do this so as to prejudice their successors. The right to sell drink is not a right inherentin citizenship of the ignited Kingdom, for the selling of drink is prohibited under heavy penalties to the 45,000,000 inhabitants of these islands, with the exception of fewer than 200,000 licensed persons. Parliament has given no pledge that can bind its successors, and expressly disclaimed any such intention; and the State inipairs no man's Constitutional right of property when, on grounds of public safety and morals, it empowers the people to say, if they are of that opinion, that this traffic is a business in which no citizen may lawfully engage. You cannot rightly burden the safety of society with a condition that the State must compensate owners for pecuniary losses which they may sustain because they are not to be permitted to inflict injury upon the community by a harmful use of their property.

To do the Trade justice, Mr. Batty makes a stronger claim for it than it makes for itself. Fifteen years ago the Liquor Trade was in the heyday of its political power. It ordered Mr. Balfour's Government to bring in a Bill to protect it. The vital clause of that Bill was actuallydrafted in the office of the National (Liquor) Trade Defence, Association! Mr. Balfour was an obsequious servant; what " the Trade " asked he readily. gave out of the national stock of freedom of which he was the acting trustee. The Trade asked for a limitation of the poviers of the Justices in respect of on-licences—though not of offlicences. It secured that; but—the Trade did not venture, even with the Government "on the knee," to 'demand compensation out of public funds! There was no legal claim to compensation by the State then, and the Licensing Act of 1904 did not create it. Once again, with that fatal infelicity which seems to characterize his use of the argument from analogy, Mr. Batty asks me if I am " prepared to treat the Licensing Act of 1904—under the sanction of which for •a period of some fifteen years hundreds of millions have changed hands—as a ' scrap of paper.' " I reply. incidentally that "hundreds of millions" have not "changed hands" since 1904. But few public-houses have been bought, and those mainly from owners who could not make them pay. The share and debenture capital open for public dealings is comparatively small, and the market has been singularly inert, mainly from dread of what the future has in store. The Trade does not believe in the sanctity of the Act of 1904 as much as Mr. Batty has recently come to believe. It knows how it was carried; it knows what the verdict of the nation in 1908 was-upon it; it knows that public opinion has steadily hardened against it among many persons who are in no way associated with the organized Temperance forces; it knows that the industrial classes are bitterly hostile to the profiteering liquor makers and sellers, and that no claim for compensation out of public funds would be listened to by them. In The Case for the Trade, issued in 1908 by the National Trade Defence Association, the case was stated thus: " The interest is as precarious as before, but [owing to the Act of 1904] upon its destruction the persons interested in it receive some compensation," not, of course, from the taxpayer, but from the Trade itself. That is the highest that the Trade can put their claim. Mr. Batty would give them far more than they ask. The Act of 1904 has no moral sanction behind it. and for Mr. Batty to. compare the Treaty under which we undertook to protect helpless Belgiumf with an Act, passed by a discredited Parliament, to render, if possible, more than thirty millions of people helpless in the hands of a dangerous and unscrupulous monopoly, shows a strange inability to recognize the moral issues of history.

It is interesting to note the great variety of aim and method which prevails among the supporters of nationalization. The nationalization umbrella must be a very large one to cover them all, and there will be many struggles as to who shall hold the stick. Mr. Bramley wants the public-house to be the centre of the social life of the industrial classes, with the women and children sitting among the drinkers. Sir Thomas Whittaker, on the other hand, though supporting nationalization, would rightly deem such a system nothing less than a national disaster. Mr. Neild says that the Carlisle experiment is not "a business ";.Lord D'Abernon, again, says it is a business, and a good one at that. Some want to make money out of it; to others such a plan is anathema; and so on. I wish your correspondents would all agree on their scheme, and then we should know where we stood. I think we should find, after the struggle was over, that the word " nationalization," like the tails of the Kilkenny cats, would be all that would survive.

" Some things do harm because. of their accidental features, and a mischief can be avoided without the destruction of the thing itself; but with the, liquor traffic the mischief is not to be found in the drinker, the drink-seller, the drink-shop, or the destination of the profits, but in the alcohol, and no inch tinkering with surroundings as is practised by the tenet com

panies, can remove the evil. The evils of the trade are inherent in the article sold.. The desire for filthy lucre will not explain them away. There are hosts of men in the Trade who have done their beet, and it would be a monstrous libel today the discredit of this ghastly failure at the door of their cupidity. Many houses have been run with no exclusive eye to profit. Hosts of these men are infinitely better than the occupation they follow. The giant demon with whom they have struggled has been too much for them. . . . Temperance will never be promoted by the sale of strongdrink."

So wrote Mr. Batty in the Nineteenth Century as lately as February, 1915. With that judgment I agree.—I am, Sir, &c., Geonon B. WILSON, Political and Literary Secretary.

United Kingdom Alliance, 1 Victoria Street, S.W. 1.

P.S.—Since writing the foregoing letter .I have read with amazement the statement in your leading article of September 27th that "For over sixty years the II.K.A. has been demanding that the austerity of the few should be imposed upon the many against their will." The exact opposite is the truth. The R.K.A. stands, as it has always stood, for the Prohibition of the liquor traffic, demanding as a first step that power be given to the people, on the widest possiblefranchise, to prohibit in their own localities, by their direct votes, the issue and reneival of all intoxicating liquor licences, and of course the supply of liquor in clubs. It is a power exercised in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and will be in operation next year in Scotland.

[We regret that we shall he unable to publish further letters of this length.—En. Spectator.]