EXPERIMENTAL LEGISLATION. 765 



to draw analogies between their condition and that of our great, busy, 

 turbulent Anglo-Irish towns. At any rate it is obvious that experi- 

 ments ought to be made upon the most closely proximate cases which 

 can be found, and, if three or four such towns as Birmingham, Bristol, 

 Bolton, and Newcastle-upon-Tyne could be induced to try the Gothen- 

 burg scheme, it would be an ample first experiment. Even between 

 English towns the differences of magnitude, race, occupation, and lo- 

 cal government are often so great that it is by no means certain that 

 the same scheme will succeed equally in all. The differences in the 

 intemperance rates in the several boroughs of England, to which I shall 

 perhaps draw attention on a future occasion, are so extraordinary and 

 profound that the Committee of the House of Lords were thoroughly 

 bewildered on the subject. Under such circumstances it should not 

 be assumed that uniform legislation must be the ultimate object of our 

 efforts. 



It is a most important question how far the proposals of the 

 United Kingdom Alliance for the Suppression of the Liquor Traffic 

 can be approved from the point of view here taken up. I venture to 

 maintain that those proposals, so far as embodied in the Permissive 

 Prohibitory Bill, now dropped, had all the possible evils of a great 

 legislative leap in the dark, with few of the corresponding possible 

 advantages. Four years ago, in a paper read to the Manchester Sta- 

 tistical Society, I gave reasons for believing that the long-continued 

 and costly proceedings of the Alliance were simply thrown away, ex- 

 cept so far as they might be a warning against similar unwise attempts 

 at legislation. I showed that the Alliance were striving against triple 

 improbabilities : firstly, the improbability (as manifested by the de- 

 creasing ratio of the ayes to the noes in the House of Commons' 

 divisions) that Parliament would ever pass the bill ; secondly, the im- 

 probability that, if passed, the Permissive Act would be largely adopt- 

 ed by local authorities ; thirdly, the improbability that, if adopted, it 

 would succeed in lessening intemperance. According to the mathe- 

 matical principle of the composition of probabilities by multiiDlication, 

 the probability that any good would ever result from an agitation 

 costing more than a quarter of a million pounds, and extending 

 already beyond a quarter of a century in duration, was practically nil. 

 The only effective answers given to my arguments were those of the Rev. 

 Mr. Steinthal and one or two others, who held that the probabilities in 

 question are not altogether independent, because Parliament could 

 hardly be forced to pass the bill unless there wei-e extensive localities 

 wishing to adopt it. There is a certain amount of truth in this objec- 

 tion, but it does not to any great degree strengthen the position of the 

 Alliance. Their proposals in their original form seem to me to have 

 the character of a vast experiment — so vast that it was intended to 

 involve the extinction of the trade of publicans and liquor-dealers 

 generally in all parts of the country. Now, that is an experiment, be- 



