ILLEGALITY BY LICENSING MAGISTRATES.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume VIII, Issue 390, 13 January 1898, Page 16

ILLEGALITY BY LICENSING MAGISTRATES.

On Wednesday, November 10, at the adjourned Brewster Sessions, at South Shields, the magistrates granted a full license for a monetary payment of £lOOO cash and a condition that the applicant gave up, in addition, three existing offlicenses. Licenses were also granted to two grocers, on the understanding that they paid £3OO in money and discontinued their grocery business entirely. We hope the local authorities won’t continue this sort of thing. Firstly, the licenses, being improperly granted, are liable to be held in value at the instance of anyone who likes to put the law in motion; and, secondly, the sale of justice is a scandal and contrary to all morality. If the licenses were needed they ought to have been granted without the imposition of an illegal penalty, and if they were not needed they ought not to have been granted at all. We hope the report that has reached us is not a correct one, for it is difficult to understand how any body of justices can be guilty of so glaring an offence as the selling of justice under such circumstances, well knowing, as they must know, the danger they run of provoking hostile criticism from both the teetotal and trade sides at once. It is, if true, unfair to other licensed victuallers ; is is unfair to the persons to whom such licenses have been granted ; and it is also equally unfair to the justices themselves. We hope some explanation may be given that will remove any doubt. Our contemporary, the Alliance News, for once in a way,'agrees with us in this method of doing business, and as representing the extremes of thought we hope the saying in medio tutissimus will not prevail, but rather that the South Shields magistrates will come to the ground between the two stools of teetotal and trade opinions.— Licensed Victuallers Gazette.