Liquor-Sale Restrictions in England.
The new British licensing bill abolishes 30,000 bars, provides for the annual renewal of licenses and the police inspection of all places where liquor is sold, Pall Mall clubs included, and it reduces to three hours the time during which public houses may remain open on Sunday. It invests the licensing authority in justices of the peace, who are empowered to exclude children from barrooms, and who may decide whether women shall be employed as bartenders. It allows compensation for liquorsellers put out of business, who are to be reimbursed for fourteen years by the assessment of the surviving license-holders. After that period the granting of new licenses is made dependent on local option, and the theory of property in liquor licenses will cease. In this country no such theory has been generally admitted. The bill is decried as socialistic and an attack on vested interests. A financial panic is predicted as a result of its reversal of an established British industry. But if, as critics of the bill say, it will not diminish drinking, what have the great brewers to fear who are fighting it? To American liquor interests, accustomed to frequent regulation, the measure will seem less drastic. It would prove acceptable as the alternative of absolute prohibition contained in recent southern and western state and county legislation. The British plan of saloon control restricts the sale of liquor to conditions of least harm and offensiveness. Laws on similar lines would be a logical outcome of the far-reaching temperance agitation in this country.—New York World.