TRADE CITIZENS AND THEIR RIGHTS.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, 10 November 1910, Page 20

TRADE CITIZENS AND THEIR RIGHTS.

In an interview with a press representative, Aiderman Edward Johnson, chairman of the British Central Trade Board, emphasised the view that protests of the Trade against injustice must now and always be based primarily upon the broad ground of the rights of licensed victuallers as citizens. In supporting the claims of his party to just and equitable recognition he said: “As citizens and no more—for we want no favours—as citizens and no less, lor we demand that fair right as citizens which as denizens of a free country we have a right to expect. Whatever burdens are placed on the shoulders of our fellow-countrymen we desire to bear in equitable proportions, and will not shrink from bearing them. We are not aliens in a strange land. The country’s interests are our own, as are its aspirations. We give ourselves freely in its service. We are not an indifferent contribution to the nation’s strength. There are, or were, some hundred thousand hostelries and inns in England. They represent so many homes in which our helpers and servants are employed and our children are being trained and reared. From these homes regular contributions of human units are made to the Army and Navy and the other public services. Many even find their way into the services of the Church as well as of the State. We pay rates and taxes in excess of our fellow-citi-zens. We pay higher licenses than, are expected from them to a State which used to give us a kind of guarantee of the security of our calling as it now does to them. On these and a thousand other grounds we protest. We must be treated fairly as citizens. We are neither out-laws nor pariahs, nor Israelites, but veritable citizens in a hitherto free and justice-loving State. And : we savi more. We will no longer remain silent and inactive under “hard and biting laws” imposed on us by a cult alien to England and its institutions whose novel doctrines are fast sapping the liberties of the people and making them hate instead of love the iand that Shakespeare knew, and that our forbears delighted to honour and to serve. And we contend that in the main we have been true servants of the btate as becomes all good citizens. Our business is one that has been created by the public’s necessities. We have sheltered in and welcomed to our premises, it is true, “all ranks and conditions of men,” and they have valued the provision that we have made for them, for we have facilitated their business pursuits in their daily life in hundreds of ways

which need not be enumerated. We have been members of no political cabal. We have not sought to persecute or injure any class. We have furthered all social schemes that have aimed at the betterment of the people. Missionary societies, friendly clubs and benefit societies, municipal bodies, civic movements, have all found shelter and encouragement in the inn. The highest authorities in the Church and State have acknowledged that the inn cannot be dispensed with as a social centre, an institution, as Mr. Chesterton puts it, wherein men may meet without encountering class prejudices* and talk on all matters as man to man. The first duty of a Government to citizens such, as we have is certainly to protect an institution invaluable in the social organism from impairment in its ideals as well as its uses; to strengthen it and not to wreck it. But we are fallen on degenerate ■days. Party governments are justifying Bastiat’s dictum that the State is the great robber. So far as we are concerned the State is now not -only the great robber, but the master burglar and the great garotter. It is not only scuttling our ship, but by preventing debate and misrepresenting the voice of the electorate, it is stifling our voices and muzzling our protests and our pleas. As citizens we appeal to our fellow citizens. They must not imagine that in the long run we shall suffer alone. If one member of the Comjnonwealth suffers from injustice the other will suffer with it. We go so far as to say that even the enemies of the Trade will suffer in the recoil of feeling which is sure to come. Justice and right cannot be carried on under exactions which are known in no other industry or calling. Let it not be urged against us that our business begets scandals, for there is no business, nor ever will be so long as human nature is marked by frailty and imperfection, carried on without them. Is the law free from them or the church? Of the million transactions that go on daily in the inns of England perhaps not one in a thousand is unsatisfactory fn a-mor--al sense. Can this be said of the Press of the country, or of the business of courts, or of Parliament itself. Imposts placed on our Trade — imposts it is impossible it can pay — are running thousands of innocent investors who are rapidly losing as citizens all sense of pride in their country. They are sapping loyalty where it can only truly exist, in the hearts and affections of the people, and as citizens we can never rest until we have rendered impotent the machinations of politicians who are frittering away in tyrannical exactions the interests and the solidarity of the great empire that has been placed in their care and keeping. Industries ruined by the bad administration of conscienceless Governments have, under Providence, a terrible method of revenging themselves. Their upholders leave a country that does them no honour, just as they are leaving us now for “foreign parts” in thousands weekly. That is the way Providence secures its own moral ends, and defeats the games of intriguers who sacrifice the sense of duty at the shrine of what they think to be a party majority, and prevents them making serfs of free citizens.