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