CHAPTER XIII

THE TWO PUBLIC HOUSES

1. THE ALEHOUSE.

Judged by no o'er-zealous rigour Much this mystic throng expresses; Bacchus was the type of vigour And Silenus of excesses.

LONGFELLOW: "Drinking Song."

Whatever you may think about it you cannot travel from Charing Cross to Dijon through the hop-fields of Kent to the vineyards of the Cote-d'Or without admitting that whether the vine be a gift of good or evil it has come to stay. Bacchus is still full of vigour and has as many followers as ever. But the law has nothing to say to Bacchus. The law is after old Silenus. It lures him into a den and makes him drunk and then locks him up, and the holy Willies wag their heads at his shame and collect money for his reformation.

There are two public houses open to the poorer citizens--the Alehouse and the Workhouse. The rich man frequents neither, yet as magistrate or guardian he takes upon himself to lay down the rules by which they shall be run. These fussy, amiable, amateur bosses have conspicuously failed at their job. It is not to be wondered at. As an able Manchester business man once said to me of his partner: "He loves sitting on the licensing bench, and thank heaven he does; it keeps him out of the office." But even if the bosses were capable and intelligent they could not hope to succeed in their work. Public institutions should be governed by the men who make use of them. The rich man's public-house is so regulated--and what is the result? One may not approve of every detail of cookery or decoration at hotels like the Ritz in London, or the Adelphi and Midland in Liverpool and Manchester, but the average middle-class man will find in them such reasonable standard of comfort as he desires. There is, at all events, space and light and air, cleanliness, and some luxury. On proper occasions and in fit places there is music, dancing, and billiards, and you may play a game of bridge with your friends when you wish, even for threepence a hundred, in a private room. Moreover, there is always food of good quality obtainable at varied prices, and you need not take your drink standing at a counter, though you can if you wish to when there is an American bar.

Why may not the working man have similar entertainment at the Pig and Whistle? A complete answer to that question would necessitate a study of the position of artificers and labourers in the middle ages and a short history of the ideals of the well-to-do puritans.

The rich have had two objects in view in their legislation about the working-man's public house. A certain section of the rich--the brewers--have aimed at a monopoly of the right to sell him ale, and nothing else, at the biggest possible profit to themselves. A second section opposing the first--the teetotal magistracy--have sought to make the public house as dreary and miserable a place as possible in order to punish the wicked man who wants to drink ale. Between the brewer and the puritan the respectable working man with a normal thirst has been jockeyed out of his freedom. Swilling and tippling in alehouses and private clubs has been encouraged; the reasonable use of ale--which Mr. Belloc rightly asserts to be the finest beverage in the world--has been crabbed and discouraged. Except an opium den--of which I have only hearsay knowledge--there is probably nothing more comfortless and degrading than the lower-class alehouse of our towns and cities.

Even in the remote days of Plato it was recognised--at all events by philosophers--that there was such a thing as thirst. "No one desires _drink_ simply, but good drink, nor food simply, but good food; because, since all desire good things, if thirst is a desire, it must be a desire of something good." Further on in the discussion, Socrates addresses Ademantus thus: "Then for any particular kind of drink there is a particular kind of thirst; but thirst in the abstract is neither for much drink, nor for little, neither for good drink nor for bad, nor, in one word for any kind of drink, but simply and absolutely thirst for drink is it not?"

"Most decidedly so," replies Ademantus--who never on any occasion stood up to Socrates and contradicted him. "Most decidedly so."

"Then the soul of a thirsty man," continues Socrates, "in so far as he is thirsty has no other wish than to drink; but this it desires and towards this it is impelled."

"Clearly so."

If the licensing bench, and especially the teetotal portion of it, could once arrive as far in their studies of the subject as Socrates had done, and could comprehend the zoological fact that man was a mammal with a thirst, they would be on the road to enlightenment, temperance, and reform.

Of course Socrates knew all that the puritans know and a lot more about the rational satisfaction of love and hunger and thirst and the irrational and concupiscent desires that are attached to all natural appetites, but in dealing with the law of licensing in reference to the poor these considerations are not really important. What is wanted is equality. Grant to the poor the same reasonable facilities of enjoyment that you grant to the rich, and leave it to public opinion to see that they are not abused.

It is a grave disaster that the granting and regulation of licenses should have fallen into the hands it has. Mr. Balfour's observation "that among all the social evils which meet us in every walk of life, every sphere of activity, the greatest of all evils is the evil of intemperance" is useful as a peroration to any platform speech on the subject, but only makes the judicious grieve that with the opportunity to do exactly as he liked and the ability to draft useful legislation, Mr. Balfour did nothing whatever to improve matters and diminish the evil of which he was so sensible.

Section 4 of his Act does indeed enable the magistrates to grant new licenses and to make their own conditions as to the payments to be made by the licensee, the tenure of the license, and any other matters "as they think proper in the interests of the public." Under this section if there were a licensing bench containing a working majority of friends of the people, men who had no social or political interest whatever either in breweries or teetotallers, it would seem that almost any experiment in model public houses could be made under any regulations that the bench chose to impose on the licensee. Mr. Balfour was perfectly right in telling us that "love of temperance is the polite name for hatred of the publican"; but what is the right name for love of the brewer? The fact is that with these two warring political factions in the field the ideal public house is not for this generation. No use will ever be made of Section 4 under present conditions, because whoever applied for a license, and however noble and beautiful the licensed premises were to be, however ideal the provision of food, entertainment and drink, and whatever the guarantees of good management, the combined opposition of the puritans and the brewers would always strive to defeat or destroy any effort to give the poorer classes pure beer in pure surroundings.

The first step you have to take is to convince the unenlightened puritan that the Alehouse is, or ought to be, as worthy a public house as the church or the school. This might be done by means of thoughtfully prepared text books of English literature. There is no great English book from the Bible downwards that has not incidental good and holy things to tell you of "The Inn." What an appetising volume could be written of the inns and innkeepers of Charles Dickens. How he revelled in their outward appearance and the inward soul of welcome which he found there. How he rejoiced in his sane English way over "The Maypole," "with its overhanging stories, drowsy little panes of glass and front bulging out and projecting over the pathway," and honest John Willet, the burly, large-headed man with a fat face, intended by providence and nature for licensed victualling. Could we have met Mrs. Lupin anywhere else than beneath the sign of that "certain Dragon who swung and creaked complainingly before the village alehouse door"? Could Mark Tapley have acquired his saintly outlook on life anywhere but at "The Blue Dragon," and are we not full of joy to find him returning there to live happily ever afterwards under the "wery new, conwivial, and expressive" sign of "The Jolly Tapley"? How pleasant it is to assist Crummles and Nicholas over their bowl of punch and the beefsteak-pudding in the inn on the Portsmouth Road. Pickwick is a cyclopaedia of inns, each with its own human character, good, bad and indifferent. Who has not stayed at a "Peacock" with a "mantelshelf ornamented with a wooden inkstand, containing one stump of a pen and half a wafer: a road book and directory: a county history minus the cover: and the mortal remains of a trout in a glass coffin"?

One could run on in pleasant remembrances of these beautiful and delightful places by the hour, but one imagines that even the most hardened political teetotaller must really know all about them, and perhaps in his dreams strolls into "The Marquis of Granby" and sips his glass of reeking hot pine-apple rum and water with a slice of lemon in it, and awakens to the horrible imagination that his astral body has wandered instinctively into a manifestation of his master and leader, the incomparable Stiggins.

One very noticeable matter about any old-world book in which inns are faithfully pictured is that in former days there was a real race of English innkeepers, independent licensed victuallers, not mere brewers' managers. There are still a few remaining with us who keep up the old traditions, but the political forces of brewers and teetotallers have squeezed this excellent race of public servants almost wholly out of existence. You remember the Six-Jolly-Fellowship-Porters whose bar was "a bar to soften the human breast" with its "corpulent little casks and cordial bottles radiant with fictitious grapes in bunches and lemons in nets and biscuits in baskets, and polite beer-pulls that made low bows when customers were served with beer." How could there have been such an ideal haven for the weary porters but for the sole proprietor and manager, Miss Abbey Potterson, whose dignity and firmness were a tradition of the riverside?

And then the dressing down she gave Rogue Riderhood.

"But you know, Miss Potterson," this was suggested very meekly though, "if I behave myself you can't help serving me, miss."

"_Can't I!_" said Abbey with infinite expression.

"No, Miss Potterson; because you see the law----"

"I am the law here, my man," returned Miss Abbey, "and I'll soon convince you of that if you doubt it at all."

"I never said I did doubt it at all, Miss Abbey."

"So much the better for you."

And how much better not only for Rogue Riderhood, but for all of us, if we could once again make licensed victualling a great and respectable trade, and once again have a race of people managing businesses that they could really take a pride in.

The death of the old Boniface who owned his house and bought his beer in the open market was brought about by the amalgamation of the smaller breweries in the country, and the purchase of the bulk of the licensed houses by the big breweries. The teetotallers assisted this natural evolution by harassing individual owners with trumpery prosecutions, opposing alterations and transfers at licensing sessions, and surrounding the commercial life of an individual licensee with persecution and annoyance and continued threats of impending ruin. One man could not fight the great moneyed forces of the puritans, and the licensed holder was glad to get out of an impossible trade by selling his interest to the brewers. Most of the licensed houses in the country now belong in everything but name to the big brewery companies. Their political friends have given them a vested interest in their licenses, and the teetotallers having spent large sums of money and wasted much energy in manoeuvring their opponents into this excellent position, now sit sulkily at the gates of it, and as they cannot do any effective good themselves, take earnest pleasure in preventing any enlightened brewer from making the conditions under which he sells his drink better and healthier for the community.

The result is that the poor man suffers. In the whole of this long unworthy struggle between the political teetotaller and the brewer, the higher interests of the poor and the real desires of the working classes are scarcely ever mentioned--still less considered. When he is in sufficient numbers, and is well enough off to do so, the poor man starts a club like his betters, and no doubt these are valuable institutions, but the club at the best does little for the wives and children, and is apt, unless the public opinion of it is sound, to lead a man astray owing to its very privacy. The puritan ideal is to drive the drinker into dark secret places, and as far as possible make his surroundings uncomfortable and degrading. The policy of the future is going to be to encourage the authorities--and, if necessary, get new and more up-to-date authorities--to replace the old dark, dirty puritan pub with a bright and enchanting reformed inn, fit for all classes of folk, with music, entertainment, and all manner of reasonable refreshment. Nothing can be done until we recognise frankly that for years we have been moving along a false track towards a mirage castle in the air, and that if anything useful is to be achieved by administration or legislation we must turn our backs on the past and start along a new road.

Some few facts seem beyond dispute. The mere cutting down of licenses has in itself no demonstrable effect on the evil of the drink habit. The manners and habits of all classes of people are tending to temperance and sobriety, but the consumption of exciseable articles is increasing--last year there was an increase of L5,128,000 over the figures of 1912.

What, then, is to be done? I think if we really want to do good in the matter and can approach it without a desire to make dividends out of brewery shares, or make alliances with teetotallers for political ends, we shall have to look to some extent to foreign examples for guidance in our difficulties.

All of us who have had leisure and money to see something of foreign countries know that the squalid ideal of the brewer and the puritan is not the only possible solution of such social difficulty as there is in providing reasonable alehouses. The British public-house is a national disgrace thrust by the rich on the poor by means of law. The working man has no chance of amending things, as he has no say in electing the bosses. Labour leaders short-sightedly favour the puritans' views. Certainly, our public-houses being what they are, it is a choice of evils to keep out of them.

But why should public-houses be what they are? I well remember at Mayence entering a beautiful public hall--it was a rainy night, or the entertainment would have been out of doors--where there was a fine string band playing excellent music. Men, women, and children sat at tables and had ham and bread and cake and beer and coffee, and those who wished to do so smoked. There was no swilling at counters, there was no forced teetotalism, there was no drunkenness; merely domestic liberty for rational enjoyment.

Why cannot there be sufficient free trade in the beer business of this country to allow an individual or, if you prefer it, an enlightened municipality--where such exists--to copy the sane entertainments of our German neighbours? A working man and his wife and children spend their evening listening to the band in a German beer-garden with as little sense of impropriety as Lord and Lady De Vere and the Hon. Gladys De Vere take their lunch at the Ritz, or Alderman and Mrs. Snooks lunch in the French restaurant at the Midland.

But in England these domestic felicities are for the rich alone. The brewers and puritans have given the poor man a mean tippling-house to booze in, and deny him anything better. His wife is looked upon as degraded if she joins him at the only place where he can spend his leisure, and the rich lawgivers put the true stamp on their own invention by enacting that it is an unfit place for little children to enter.

The fact is that the public house should be built in the interests of the public. There seems no great decrease in the desire to drink good ale. It is a national taste, and, if the ale be good, it is probably at least as healthy, or healthier, than drinking tea as tea is brewed in cottage homes. But in the name of liberty and equality, surely if a man wants to drink ale in moderation he should be encouraged to do so in bright, pleasant surroundings, where he can spend his evenings at a moderate cost with his wife and children and meet his friends. He should be allowed to open such a place himself if the municipality will not do it for him, and the more civilised brewers should be assisted and encouraged by the licensing authorities to build big, spacious public houses, where the poor man could obtain similar entertainment to that provided for his wealthier brother.

There is something almost shameless in the way in which the law of licensing is stretched to the uttermost for the rich and drawn to the narrowmost for the poor. One picks up a paper with an account of the latest midnight ball--the gayest event of the season--all in the interests of charity, of course. What has become of that closing time which, if overstepped by the poor, means police court for the criminals and loss of license to the innkeeper? It has been extended, no doubt, by a complacent magistrate, and you can sit down to supper at midnight, and all night long you can refresh yourself at American bars presided over by beautiful ladies of the chorus. One gathers there will be no closing time at all, as breakfasts will be served from three o'clock. In the intervals of the dancing there are to be famous music-hall turns. At some of these fashionable dances valuable prizes are given, at others these fall to lucky ones by some form of lot--not lottery, of course, for that would be against the law, and these entertainments are arranged by eminent leaders of society who are always within the law--well within it.

It would be ill mannered to endeavour to stop so much innocent enjoyment of a class that has so little real pleasure by enforcing the licensing and other laws to interfere with their amusements. On the contrary, we should seek to use their example and better our own licensing circumstances by an appeal to their precedent. If it is good for leaders of society to sing and dance and sup after hours in their public houses, why should not the rest of society be allowed to follow their example and have their own beanfeasts in ample public houses undisturbed by the law? Of course there must be a charity! Give me an extension of license in the Old Kent Road and I will provide plenty of charities and plenty of lads and lasses ready to sing Mr. Adrian Ross's refrain:

Care has gone to sleep till morning, Night's the noon of joy.

For the young people of the poor are just as fond of a spree as those of the rich, and quite as ready to be charitable to the extent of their means after the same fashion.

There is an excellent letter of Charles Kingsley's written to the "Christian Socialist" some sixty years ago that might well be circulated among licensing benches by the Home Office--though I believe it is considered officially to be bad economy to address printed common sense to the unpaid magistracy. Naturally, autocrats resent or scoff at advice that has no sanction behind it. The teetotal attitude of mind and the quarrels it aroused very properly disgusted Kingsley. He took no pleasure in hearing the water drinkers calling the beer drinkers "flabby, pot-bellied, muddle-headed, disgusting old brutes," and the beer drinkers retorting on the water drinkers that they were "conceited puritans and manichees and ascetics." He saw that the quarrel would not do any good to the cause of temperance, and in his honest enthusiasm blurted out the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about his teetotal friends, like the good old Christian warrior that he was.

"On my honour," he writes, "unless the teetotallers show a more humble, gentle and tolerant spirit than is common among them I shall advise beer drinkers like myself and Mr. Hughes (Tom Brown of the Schooldays) either to flee the country, or if their cloth allows them, which mine does not, prove by self-defence that a man can value his beer, and thank God for it with a good conscience, as tens of thousands do daily and yet feel as tight about the loin and as wiry in the arm as any teetotaller in England. Honestly, I am jesting in earnest. I regard this teetotal movement with extreme dread. I deeply sympathise with the horror of our English drunkenness that produced it. I honour every teetotaller as I honour every man who proves by his action that he possesses high principle and manful self-restraint.... That a man should be a teetotaller rather than a drunkard needs no proof. Also that a man should go about in a sack rather than be a fop and waste time and money on dress. But I think temperance in beer, like temperance in clothes, is at once a more rational and a higher virtue either than sackcloth or water."

This was true doctrine then and is true doctrine to-day, and the sad fact that it fell on deaf ears and is still but half understood is the reason of our backwardness in licensing reform and the presence of the degrading public house which the law cherishes and protects.

Only the other day in a country town, on the application for a license, the police superintendent objected to the house on the ground of the small bar accommodation. His Grace the Duke, who happened to be in the chair, wanted to know if the proprietor of the house would prepare a plan for enlarging the bar accommodation. What could the proprietor do? The police wanted to herd the drinkers into a bar so that they could pop their heads in and see them all at once without any trouble, the bench wanted to do what the police wanted them to do. The interests of the poor, the cause of temperance, the betterment of the social life of the people were as irrelevant to the case as the flowers that bloom in the spring.

At many a licensing session, too, you will listen to solemn warnings by the superintendent of police against the public being allowed to amuse themselves with penny-in-the-slot machines or gramophones or parlour quoits or the like. Amusement is regarded with a natural horror by the puritan, and the friends of the brewer see in it a dangerous alternative to the duty of the working man to drink. One police authority threatened the license holders "that if they continued to allow these machines to be used in their licensed premises they did so at the risk of prosecution for allowing gaming." The gaming laws of England with their wholesale permission of gambling in one place and their retail persecution of gambling in another place, and their incapacity to know when a place is not a place or how otherwise, are a public laughing stock, but it is a grievous thing that they should be dragged out to drive a little harmless amusement out of the dingy tavern which is the only public institution the poor man has for rest and recreation.

As a matter of fact, these machines, if they are used for gambling, are generally used to see who shall pay for drinks. In some bars in foreign countries a dice-box is always handy for this purpose. Three or four friends come in and throw, the loser pays for drinks, and all are satisfied, and having had their drink they go. I am not upholding the custom as ideal, but I see little harm in it. In England, if three or four enter a public house, the etiquette in many places is for one to stand drinks, and for the rest in turn to offer to stand another round--an offer seldom refused--and for the rounds to continue until each has stood his corner. I would not go so far as to insist on a compulsory dice-box in every bar, but I fancy on the whole that it is an agent of temperance.

Every one who has given any thought to temperance as opposed to teetotalism, is agreed that what is wanted is the gradual elimination of bars and counters and the substitution of chairs and tables and big open rooms. In these must be provided tea, coffee, and all the usual lighter refreshments that you find in the better-class restaurants and hotels. In a big West End hotel you find every afternoon that the lounge is laid out for afternoon tea. I do not see why a working man and his wife should not have their tea in a lounge in their public house. I cannot understand why, if two friends after a day in the workshop want to have a friendly chat, they cannot find an institution where one can have his cup of tea and a muffin, and the other his glass of ale and a sandwich, and both sit at one table in a spacious room with comfortable surroundings, and if they do not heartily dislike it a gramophone to play tunes to them. That is impossible of attainment as the law now stands. If a millionaire was to offer to build in Manchester a dozen working-men's cafes on the continental plan where any decent citizen could be pleased to take his wife and children, as our French and German neighbours do, the brewers, the teetotallers, the police, the licensing magistrates and the law would see that it was not permitted.

And yet we know by experiment that in proper surroundings, reasonable facilities for refreshment do not lead to drunkenness. In the Manchester Exhibition of 1887, it being a wonderfully fine summer, and licenses having been freely given for the occasion, there was an opportunity of testing whether under proper conditions opportunity led to excess. I never heard that it did. In the Franco-British Exhibition where reasonable facilities of refreshment were also given, it is said--and I have no doubt truly said--that though eight or nine million visitors passed through the turnstiles, yet there was not a single case of drunkenness.

The problem is really a simple one, if we could only get administrators and legislators, but especially the former, to look at it in the interest of the man in the street. To the big brewery company beer is an effluent, and the public house is the conduit pipe through which they pour it into the public stomach. They have obviously no interest in ideal public houses--and why should they? They are business men on business bent. The teetotallers, on the other hand, regard the drinking of beer as a sin, and any public house as the house of the Devil. Why should they help the Devil to make his house sweet and attractive, and make the path easier for the poor sinner who thirsts after beer? At present the average licensing bench consists of "half and half"--to use a trade term--of these elements. If there happen to be a few cranks on the bench who share the feather-headed notions set down in this chapter, they can always be out-voted by a combination of brewer and teetotaller. And for my part I think we shall stick to our glorious institution of the "tied-house" just as long as the working man intends to allow us and no longer.

When reformed public houses are taken up by the men who use the public house, and when labour demands something better, the demand will be met. For the teetotaller is nothing if not political, and when he sees where the votes are, and not before, he will begin to see the error of his ways.

Meanwhile it will do him no harm to study the statistics such as they are, and discover that the number of licenses in a district has nothing to do with the amount of drunkenness therein, and to look back on the past history of the public house and recognise that he has for many years been the friend and ally of the undesirable brewer. The good citizen's policy should be the provision of pure ale in wholesome surroundings, thereby freeing the working class from the tyranny of the public house. To the teetotallers who hinder such a policy I can only repeat Charles Kingsley's message: "And I solemnly warn those who try to prevent it that they are, with whatsoever good intentions, simply doing the Devil's work."