We have now had more than a week's experience of the new Licensing Act and interest in it increases every day. The most keenly debated clause is that under which habitual drunkards may be "black-listed" for throe years, a course which, if they enter a public house within that time, entails a penalty not only on themselves but on the publican who serves them. Many have already been black-listed; but it is still believed that in London the clause will, so far as the publicans are concerned, prove a dead letter, owing, to the impossibility of making all the publicans in London familiar with the features of all the black-listed drunkards. That, however, is but one clause of the Act.' It protects the husband from his drunken wife and the wife from hor drunken husband. It regulates clubs in which liquor is sold, and it imposes more stringent conditions upon the applicants for licenses. Its best feature is that it is aimed at the drunkard and not at the moderate drinker. That is the opposite principle to that advocated by most teo-totallers. They would prevent us all from drinking good liquors because a few abuse them.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.