support the measure they so detested. They had opportunities of putting their threats in practice. There was a contested election for Norfolk. The Liberal candidate was the eldest son of a landed gentleman who had himself represented the county. He was influential and popular. Nay, he had not pledged himself to anything more than a general support of the Government. His chances of success were good, although his predecessor had been a Conservative. But the publicans were active, and he lost his election. The case of Durham was still more remarkable. There the vacancy was caused by the sudden and premature decease of a man against whom his political opponents had not a word, and whom his many personal friends held not only in regard but affection-the late Judge-Advocate, Mr. Davison. Many reasons existed to mitigate party feeling. But the cry at Durham- -a cry fatal to the Liberal candidate-was a cry of 'Down with the Licensing Bill!' We do not hesitate to affirm that a General Election during last spring would have made a difference of fifty seats to the bad' for a Liberal Government from this cause alone. And judging from the result of the East Surrey election, where the publicans were most unwisely challenged from the hustings by the proposer of the Liberal candidate, this cause has by no means ceased to operate.

Our readers will see that we entertain strong opinions as to the unfairness, the injustice-nay, we will say the cruelty-of Mr. Bruce's bill. But does it follow, therefore, that nothing should be done, or do we mean to assert that the Licensing system is absolutely perfect? We say nothing of the kind. We say that owing, in great measure, to the evil working of the Beerhouse Acts, facilities for intoxication have been multiplied, and the number of licences has been increased far beyond the requirements of the population. But it is remarkable that the measure to which we have so often referred provides in no way, except indirectly, for any speedy diminution of this admitted and acknowledged evil. For ten years to come every publichouse and beer-house in the kingdom would have a vested interest in its licence, and could only be closed in consequence of the misconduct of its holder. And yet the owners of public-houses, nay, and the occupiers also, are aware of this evil and ready to assist in the remedy. Nor is this remedy far to seek: in fact, the machinery of Mr. Bruce's bill itself suggests a means of attaining it. The licence-rent therein proposed supplies that means. Let any police regulations which are necessary be enacted for the purpose of securing good order in public-houses and of detecting adulteration. But let the expenses of such policearrangements be paid in the case of supervision of public-houses, Vol. 131.-No. 262.

2 E

as

as it is paid in all other cases, out of the rates of the district; then take the licence-rent, and use it as a sinking fund to buy up existing interests. As proposed in the bill, it was to vary between 17. and 67. As there are more than 120,000 public and beer-houses in England alone, a licence-rent of 21. would produce nearly 250,000l. a year. If this were applied in the purchase of licences, as those first offered would, of course, be in general the least valuable, it is probable that at least 5000 might be extinguished in the very first year; so that by the end of ten years, when Mr. Bruce's plan was to begin, some 30,000 licences would have been in this way put an end to. Be it also remembered that many licences lapse from various causes, and that owners of public-houses would in many cases close superfluous premises when once they were satisfied that there was no chance of fresh licences being granted in the neighbourhood. Arrangements also might easily be made for the transfer of licences to new neighbourhoods. When we consider that London increases by the size of a town not much smaller than Brighton, and larger than Southampton, every year of its existence, and has within the last ten years added 60,000 to its houses and 600,000 to its population, we may easily see that in London alone, to say nothing of other towns where the same process is going on, there would be great room for the immediate transfer of licences. At the rate, for instance, of one public-house to 500 of the population-which is only double Mr. Bruce's evidently inadequate calculation-120 licences would have to be transferred to new London districts in every year, or one every three days; so that by the end of Mr. Bruce's ten years the existing 10,000 publichouses of London would be spread over an area considerably larger and applied to a population about one-fifth more numerous. And if we assume, which we may well do, that a considerable number of licences lapse or are forfeited every year, taking these at only 5 per cent., in ten years' time we should have 6000 licences left for London with a population of some 4,000,000.

It must, however, be remembered that, short of absolute prohibition of all dealing in fermented liquors, it by no means follows that paucity of public-houses implies sobriety. Cases will be quoted, like that of Liverpool, where unlimited licensing is said to have been followed by drunkenness and disorder unequalled even in that sink of marine debauchery, and it will be argued, that when there were fewer public-houses there was less intoxication. Still, if statistics prove anything, they prove that drunkenness is partially, at all events, attributable to other causes than this. Liverpool, by a return of 1869, had one public-house or beer-house to every 166 of the population; 32.55 per

thousand

thousand were proceeded against for drunkenness. Sunderland had 1 to 149, and only 7-32 per thousand were so proceeded against. Salford had 1 to 156, with 6-21 per thousand proceeded against, and Sheffield 1 to 132, with only 5.51 per thousand proceeded against. These startling differences may be ascribed in part to differences of police activity; but when we find Manchester and Sheffield with an equal proportion of publichouses to population, and more than five times as many police cases for drunkenness in Manchester as in Sheffield (28.19 against 5.51 per thousand), it is hardly possible to believe that this is the sole reason. A story is told of an anxious wife, who wished for fewer public-houses because, as she said, there were five which her husband had to pass, and after piloting him safely by four of them he was always sure to go into the fifth. If there had been only one, it is by no means evident that he would have been coaxed past that one, for the desire of indulgence varies but to a small extent with the means of satisfying it. Craving for drink, moreover, goes hand-in-hand with misery. It is not altogether because there are so many gin-shops in St. Giles's or the New Cut that there is so much drunkenness there. Give the inhabitants fresh air, water in constant supply, less crowded lodgings, a healthier life, and much of the craving for drink will disappear. This, alas! is only partially possible. But to shut up even a large proportion of the gin-shops, while the other conditions of life remained the same, would mainly result in additional prosperity for the gin-shops which were left. It is not, however, by any means clear that any such arrangements as we have indicated above will be necessary, in order to correct with considerable rapidity the existing superfluity of public-houses. There is a constant struggle for life' going on in all trades. If no new grocer's shops, no new haberdashers were allowed, and the old ones left to die out, how rapid would be the diminution, no police regulations here coming into play. By the Bank Charter Act of 1844, new Banks of Issue were for the future prohibited, leaving to all such existing banks their permission to issue notes. Since 1844 how many Banks of Issue have disappeared or become absorbed in Joint-Stock Banks? Here was a valuable privilege-that of issuing notesconfined to certain establishments, just as a valuable privilege, that of selling exciseable liquors by retail, is confined to certain other establishments. There is every inducement to keep these establishments open; but time and chance work unexpected changes, and the same causes which have decimated the old County Banks will act, with other very important special causes,

2 E 2

in

in diminishing, and that very rapidly, the number of publichouses and beer-houses.

Our limits will not allow us to discuss a question which is yearly assuming greater prominence, the question which is known by the black-white name of Permissive Prohibition—the English form of the Maine Liquor Law. Whether such an enactment would ever stand a year's trial, or whether, if standing such trial, it would not create more evils than it abolished, is matter for argument. It is said, we know not how truly, that as soon as the necessities of the United States Exchequer compelled an excise of fermented liquors, the Maine Liquor Law ceased to act. At all events, from some cause or other, it appears at present to be to a great extent inoperative. Be this as it may, it is hardly possible to suppose that any English market-town, for example, would submit to the enormous inconvenience of being unable to supply its inhabitants and its visitors with exciscable commodities, because a small proportion of the ratepayers happened to club together at a vestry meeting and prohibit the traffic. Nothing, however, would so much discredit this somewhat grotesque crusade against liquors as a prudent and wellconsidered measure for the regulation of public-houses. Such a measure we cannot expect from the Home Office as at present constituted. There are, however, private members on both sides of the House (we may specify Sir Selwin Ibbetson on the one side and Mr. Whitbread on the other), who are perfectly well able to devise such a measure, and we trust that the promise already held out to us by the former may be fulfilled either by himself or by some one in his place, and that next Session may not pass without a determined and a successful effort to grapple with the evils of the present Licensing Laws.

ART. IV.-Opere Inedite di Francesco Guicciardini Illustrate da Giuseppe Canestrini, e Publicate per cura dei Conti Piero e Luigi Guicciardini. Volume Primo, Ricordi Politici e Civili. -Volume Decimo, Ricordi di Famiglia, Ricordi Autobiografici. Firenze, 1857-1867. By som Hilson.

THE

HE family and autobiographical Ricordi' of Guicciardini vividly reproduce in some of the last living examples that singular type of merchant statesmanship which formed so important and predominant an element in medieval Italian republican politics. They afford us the same sort of vivid con

ception

ception of that type as the Lives of the Norths' do of the race of political lawyers and men of business who rose into eminence in the perturbed politics of the last Stuart reigns in England. The alternately conflicting and mingling aristocratical and commercial elements in Italian public life had produced between them something of the like sort of mixed character as they afterwards did in England. Even in the iron age of the Sforzas and Borgias, eminently respectable private and public characters were often the growth of the mingled influences which affected public life, so long as public life was not yet stamped out in Italy. What was much more rare was anything approaching the heroic type in Italian public men. That type is rare indeed in all ages, but in the age and country of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, as in the succeeding age of Lord Keeper Guilford and Sir Dudley North in England, all aspirations after it, as well as all approach to it, seemed to have in a manner ceased.

Mediæval Italy, to borrow a well-abused phrase of the late Prince Metternich, had been little more than a geographical expression,' inferring no universal Italian rights or duties. Its several states had stood towards each other pretty much in Hobbes' state of nature, with fear, force, and fraud for sole effective regulators. The ordinary habitual relations of the mediæval Italian States to each other had been those of wavering alliance, or of covert or overt hostility. All the unbridled excesses of outrageous violence and of shameless perfidy which larger and more powerful realms permitted themselves, whenever interest prompted, against each other, were multiplied on the narrow area of the city commonwealths and petty principalities of medieval Italy. Consequently the aggregate of revolting outrages against all laws of peace and war appear to affix a deeper stigma on Italian than on any other politics in those ages. It may be doubted how far that deeper stigma is relatively merited; it is at all events certain that Italian individual and social life and morals cannot fairly be judged of from the public or private crimes of the Visconti, Sforzas, or Borgias.

The sixteenth century in Italy was an age of transition from spirited if ill-organised autonomy to a dull level of spiritual and secular despotism. It presents the spectacle of a country foremost in the opening of the march of modern civilisation suddenly finding itself the helpless object of rival rapacity to ruder but stronger states-its leading men, whose minds and characters had been formed in the liberal school of world-wide commerce and uncontrolled self-government-suddenly compelled to transfer their political activity, if they were still bent on exerting it, from the

councils