ARE PUBLICANS ENTITLED TO COMPENSATION?

Globe, Volume VIII, Issue 978, 14 August 1877, Page 3

ARE PUBLICANS ENTITLED TO COMPENSATION?

(To the Editor of the Globe.") Sir, In your remarks on the Hon. W. Fox’s Local Option Bill, contained in your Saturday's isspc, you take exception to the Bill on the ground that it does not provide compensation for those publicans who may lie so unfortunate as to lie deprived of the r licenses, in the event of the Bill becoming law In the first place, let me see what we are to compensate the publicans for The publican’s license is only for a year; he has no right to a renewal of it : and if the magistrates, on the recommendation of the police, should take it away, he has no right to compensation. What vested interest can a man have in a licence renewable every quarter, every six months, or every year ? There is a class of farmers in England who hold their farms from year to year. They are Hair© to lose their farms each year, but 1 never heard of one of them, when he lost his farm, being compensated for the loss. He considers his liability to loss when he takes his farm. Have we ever compensated for injury inflicted ou Wgo sections oi people by Icgiala*

tion for the general good ? When free trade was introduced in England did the farmers receive compensation ? When the navigation laws were altered, did anyone get any compensation ? When the French treaty was negociated by Mr Cobden, did any < f those who suffered by it get compensation? Was not Coventry reduced to ruin by it ? Who compensated the lawyers, when the Land Transfer Act came into force in this colony, and robbed them of one-half their profits ? In this case what the lawyers lost, the public gained. And I may say the same thing in reference to the publicans. “If you lose, the public will oain, and what you have gained, and are gaining, the public have lost, and do lose.” In Liverpool, when free trade was first introduced, the Liverpool people went mad about it, and, in carrying out its principles they determined to make the liquor trade free as far as possible, and they did so. Everybody who chose got a publican’s or beershop lice* se, provided his house afforded decent accommodation ; and the result was that Liverpool became aperfect pandemonium and the Liverpool people stood aghast at their own work. In the end they had to go to Parliament and get a Bill passed to get rid of all these public houses; and what did they do when they had got their Bill ? They swept away at once nearly three hundred her stops, and not one shilling of compensation was paid The same was done in Manchester and in other places. But if compensation must be paid, who is to pay it ? Surely not the sober part of the community, which has already paid so much for the existence of public houses in the shape of taxation for the suppression of crime, and in other ways, T make the intemperate pay, after having been ground to the dust in the publican’s mill, would be to add insult to injury. The only way in which compensation could be provided with justice, would bo to charge it on the continuing houses. The value of their monopoly would be vastly increased by the removal of competition which -would result from the suppression of those which were closed. They could very well afford to pay it. I have no doubt if the offer were now made to one-half of the public houses in any of our towns to|suppress the other half, on this con dition, it would be accepted. To oblige the people to tax themselves to get rid of this great social evil which has taxed them so heavily and so long, would be an act of the greatest injustice. To make the surviving publicans provide for the extinction of the suppressed, thus getting rid of the competi tion of half the trade at least, would be perfectly equitable. When the day comes that there are no survivors to pay for the extinction of the last of the race of publicans, why then we will give the case our special consideration. But to conclude— The liquor trade is an acknowledged nuisance, only tolerated because of its supposed necessity, and it would be contrary to all precedent and all justice to offer compensation to the perpetrator of a nuisance. The liquor sellers have no title whatever to compensation. No part of their property is taken from them. They are deprived of no right. They are simply deprived of a privilege granted conditionally for the public benefit {?), and liable at any time to be withheld from them, as it now is from all the rest of the community. The tenure of the license has been made to hold only from year to year for the express purpose of enabling the Government of the country to keep a very tight rein upon a trade, which in all ages and in all countries has proved itself a nuisance, and a source of moral aud social deterioration. The only plea now held out as the ground of a supposed •‘vested interest ” is the culpable leniency with which the Government have long treated the holders of licenses. To make the supineness of Government, and still worse, its complicity with acknowledged abuse, an excuse for further leniency towards those who profit by it. at the expense of society in general, would lie a most dangerous innovation in the principles of legislation. The license holder knows the exceptional risks of his trade he calculates on i ! s exceptional profits—aud he has therefore no more title to compensation than would a.iy other tradesman whose business fails to | answer his expectations Yours, &c., C. M. GRAY.