MR ASQUITH’S FAMOUS BILL.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume XVI, Issue 947, 30 April 1908, Page 21

MR ASQUITH’S FAMOUS BILL.

Many of our readers wil'l no doubt follow the passage of this Bill with considerable interest. Up to now we have had only cable messages regarding it. However, we are, by last Home mail, in receipt of the full test of the Bill, which is too lengthy for publication. We will content ourselves with giving our readers the comments made by the leading papers in the Old Country. These indicate clearly that the Bill is, as one paper remarks, contrary to the will of the nation : THE DEATH-WARRANT OF THE GOVERNMENT. The more closely Mr Asquith’s astounding proposals are examined the plainer one conclusion appears. The Licensing Bill has signed that death-warrant of his Government which its previous measures had drafted and engrossed. Whether we are to see the supreme fiasco of immediate failure, or whether there is to be some temporary illusion of partial success, only to be purchased by real surrender, there can be henceforth no escape for these legislative suicides. Other blunders have been gross. This one is fatal, and its authors are doomed. From some further study of the clauses discussed recently throughout the country, and regarded with profound repugnance by an overwhelming majority of Englishmen, we have no hesitation whatever in saying that the utter iniquity of the Cabinet’s intentions can only be compared with the complete impossibility of carrying them into effect. The Chancellor of the Exche-

qiier calls his measure a Licensing Bi 1. It is a Bill for the destruction of licenses- „ Upon the same basis of principle, with no difficulty whatever in me application of' the precedent, a Socialist majority of the future could sweep away the private ownership of every species of property and extinguish existing investments in connection with every industry in the land. For this reason alone, “the” trade becomes the outpost of all trades as a result of the character of the attack made upon it by Mr Asquith’s measure; and that measure as it stands must, and will, be destroyed root and branch if there is ever again to exist in this country the vestige of security against the sheer brigandage of fanatica'. legislation. We feel utter inadequacv of words to convey a due sense of the magintude of this issue, but we beg every citizen to reflect upon it. and to take an active interest in politics henceforth, if he never did before. And Mr Asquith and his colleagues may be well assured of several things. They will be compelled to ‘‘clear their minds of cant” in this matter ; they will be forced to show the business character of their dealings with a form of trading enterprise as ''egal and authorised as any other ; they will be made to drop the nauseous pretence of morality with which thev are endeavouring to cover the raiding expeditions of partisan blackmailers ; and they will be prevented from carrying in this or in any other Session the principle of destroying private interests for Treasury purposes. That, and nothing else but that, is the object of the Government. It is the epitome of the Bill. All else is subsidiary, but it is none the less interesting. For the rest, the measure combines the sum of hypocrisy with the maximum of wrong. When we examine separatel’ r the financial effect upon the interests and the probab’e results, as regards the promotion of temperance, we shall see at once that the Bill is no less a measure of plunder in its practical bearing than it is a measure of fraud in its normal pretensions. The Government are acting precisely in the spirit of a highwayman, who first despoiled the rich in the name of pity for the poor, but took care in the next case to keep all the swag himself. There is no doubt about the robbery. But to assert that the interests of temoerance will be served bv it is an effort of cvnical effrontery almost unmatched in modern politics. and certainly never surpassed. This (the Time Limit) is not only robbery. It is the most tremendous scheme of plunder and confiscation ever contemplated in the records of public legislation. Nothing like it has been proposed in the political history of the world. We cannot now deal with the claims of the Bill as a measure for the promotion of temperance- We sha)l be able to show on. another occasion that the system of unlimited clubs under the illusory espionage of policemen in plain clothes must reduce the whole scheme tn a profligate imposture from the point of view of any sincere temperance advocate. The sheer magnitude of the measure as a scheme of despotic plunder is onl— matched by the colossal sham of its professed morality. The sense of the country will have to be taken upon this issue; but Mr Asquith may be perfectly assured that politics will be convulsed before his Bill comes even within sight of passing.—“Daib’ Telegraph.” A RIDICULOUS MEASURE. The licensing Bill which Mr Asquith brought in yesterday is an astonishing measure. They have all been provided for—the plunderer of other people’s property, the faddist, the fanatic, and. the would-be Puritan, whose m|ain idea of virtue is the forcible interference with the reasonable iberty of his neighbour if his neighbour’s tastes are not his own. The only man who is not provided for in the Bill is the genuine temperance reformer. There is not one single provision out of the many which Mr Asquith has outlined which will accelerate the pace of the rapidlv growing sobriety of this country; not a provision which will reclaim a solitary drunkard. So far as this Bill (if, as s°ems inconceivable, it ever becomes an Act) will affect temperance at all, it will effect it the wrong way. But above all. his ridiculous measure s’anfls self-condemned as one of the worst wh/Hi even this Government has proposed in regard + o its confiscatory time-limit pfonosads. These proposals are mere cmHiation. At the e n d of fourteen vears all the icensed property in the country — prooer'v which owners have acquired as anv other nroperty is acquired and for ■ wh’’ch thev have paid +he. market value—is to be stolen by the State. That is the short and true description of the scheme which Mr Asquith has wrapped up in pretty - phrases about the recovery by the State of monopolies. Colouring the statement of his dreary scheme of plunder with a touch of humour. Mr Asquith announced that the State would regain its dominion over licenses “with due regard for existing interests.” The “due regard”

proposed will prevent many brewery companies and firms from earning any profits at all, for they will have to put aside al, their profits as a sinking fund, for the debenture-holders, whose security—the licenses —is to be confiscated. It is the first time since Henry VIII. confiscated the property of the monasteries and guilds in the sixteenth century that the State has taken away a man’s property without compensating him for it, for even the slave owners were bought out. The

Radical Government proposes to treat the hundreds of thousands' of shareholders in a legitimate industry worse than our fathers treated tne proprietors of slaves. So the new Liberalism develops.—‘‘Daily Express.”