Evening Post. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 1908. PROGRESS OF THE LICENSING

Evening Post, Volume LXXVI, Issue 112, 7 November 1908, Page 4

Evening Post. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 1908. PROGRESS OF THE LICENSING

By the aid of the guillotine, the Licensing Bill continues to make steady progress through the House of Commons, but the cable messages are so bald as to give very little idea of the tone of the debates and Jhe attitude of public opinion. • Doubtless, however, vt9 are safe in assuming that the Government is having to fight every inch of the way, and that the bitter feeling displayed in the second reading debate has not in any way abated, as detail after detail of this drastic and dreaded measure has come up for discussion in committee. As was generally expected, the Bill is being extensively amended, and in almost every case the amendments are of a weakening and conciliatory character. By a majority of nearly three to one-— 315 votes to 117 — the first of the local option clauses, enabling any rural parish or urban area within a licensing district to veto new licenses, was passed unaltered. This issue is to be determined by a bare majority, ju&fc as the similar power conferred by our own Licensing Act of 1881 was determined. But the United Kingdom Alliance and ' the Labour party have buffered a severe disappointment in the change which the Government has found it necessary to make in the full measure of local option which is to come into operation after the expiry of the fourteen yeais' time limit. During JLhat period licensees are given security of tenure, with the right to compensation if their licenses arc taken away in pursuance of the compulsory reduction scheme provided by tho tlill. J3wt tho Temperance Reformova of Mils country, who gruuu uudec

tb/0 three-fifths majority, and were conFyratulating their friends in the Old 'Country on the prospect of having the issue determined by the ordinary democratic rule, will have read with mixed feelings that on the motion of the Prime Minister the House of Common^ has adopted by a majority of 160 votes an amendment necessitating a two-thirds majority for the carrying of no-license. It is hardly likely that the House of Lords will want to provide a bigger hurdle for the Temperance party to jump, and New Zealand reformers will now find reason for self-congratulation in the comparison from which they had previously drawn the opposite lesson. Of equal importance with tho main local option clause, because a necessary condition of its operation, aro the provisions relating to compensation and the time limit. On both these points we should have been glad to get fuller information, but with regard to the first, it seems from the cablegrams that the compensation clauses have passed without serious modification. The time-limit, which . is about the most difficult item in the whole problem, has, of course, given more trouble. In view of the attitude of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Church of England Temperance Society — to whose general support the Bill owes whatever chance it has of passing — it has been generally supposed that the Government would consent to an extension of tho time-limit from fourteen to twenty-one years. Mr. H. Bottomley's amendment to that effect was, however, resisted by Mr. Asquith, and the House rejected it by 287 votes to 119. If the clause stands, licenses may be extinguished without compensation after fourteen years, and if not extinguished their monopoly value will, in any case, pass to the State. But, after carrying his point, Mr. Asquith has announced the readiness of the Government " to entertain a> suggestion that for a short term of years — probably seven — after the expiry of the fourteen years' time-limit, when old licenses were regranted the re-grant would not require immediate surrender of the monopoly value of the licenses." This would mean that the licensees would retain the monopoly value for twenty-one years, subject to the risk of a two- thirds majority vote extinguishing the licenses altogether after fourteen. We cannot see much logic in the compromise, but compromises are seldom logical, and here, at any rate, is an olive branch if the House of Lords is on the look-out for one. It is, however, more, probable that their lordships will prefer a sword.