Throughout the past year we have been face to face with a grave crisis in the history of our temperance movement, but the present Session of Parliament is the moment of our most imminent peril.

In March, 1903, the Prime Minister, surrendering to the threats of the liquor trade, recklessly attacked the Magistrates because in the public interest they had here and there reduced the number of licensed houses, and he declared to the Brewer’s Deputation that in so doing the Magistrates had been guilty of “gross injustice,” and that “to such unjust confiscation of property the Government could not remain indifferent.”  In April the Government supported Mr. Butcher’s Compensation Bill, and in August Mr. Balfour gave a pledge in the House of Commons that the Government would introduce legislation “at the earliest possible moment in the following Session,” which would put an end to the present “wide-spread feeling of insecurity on the part of English license-holders.”

Since the Prime Minister made these pronouncements, our forces have everywhere set themselves in array to fight the impending legislation, by which the ‘Trade’ is to be endowed at the expense of the nation’s welfare, and is to have its privileges and its powers greatly increased.  The government, having yielded to the dictation of the Publican interest, indicated that either the Magistrates must be hindered from exercising their ancient power of not renewing annual licenses when in their discretion they deem such renewal to be against the public good; or else that some measure of compensation must be enacted, whereby this wealthy liquor monopoly should have its huge financial profits made permanently secure by the grant from Parliament of a vested interest in their licenses.  If after the passing of such a measure the Magistrates should, for the protection of the people, refuse the renewal of a license, the holder of that speculative public-house investment would be by law guaranteed against loss.  He would thus no longer need to insure himself against the risk of non-renewal, for the State would have turned this annual license into a freehold property.  Then for the first time this dangerous ‘Trade’ would have obtained that fixity of tenure which it has so long coveted, but which Parliament in its wisdom has always vigorously refused to grant; and the nation, which has already too long suffered under the oppression of the Liquor Traffic with its terrible licensed temptations, would then be permanently crushed under one of the most perilous of all the political tyrannies that ever sapped the strength and the freedom of a great people.  For these Liquor Traffickers have proclaimed cynically their anti-social aloofness, from the ideals of good citizenship; “they know no interest but their own,” and their defiant boast is heard at all elections, “Our Trade our Politics.”