Middlesex and Westminster having long held it to be a rule essential to the public good, rather to diminish than increase the number of public-houses. That persons of abandoned characters, by applying to the Commissioners of the Stamp-office, may obtain a licence for selling wine; by virtue of such licences it is that the taverns above described are kept open, for the aforesaid Commissioners are impowered by law to grant such licences to whom they shall think fit; that licences for selling spirituous liquors by retail are not granted by the Commissioners of Excise, unless the parties produce to them a licence under the hands and seals of two Justices of the Peace to sell ale. That Magistrates cannot by Law authorise any person to sell ale, without a certificate of such person's being of good fame and sober life and conversation, so that producing this licence to the Commissioners establishes their character with them, and takes away the necessity of any enquiry; for remedy of which, he proposed that Wine-licences should be placed by Law under the same restraint as the licences for selling spirituous liquors now are. This remedy, he apprehended, might probably reduce the Revenue of Wine-licences; if confined to the Bills of Mortality, it would in his opinion diminish it no more than 400_l._; but if extended to Portsmouth, Plymouth, Chatham, and other Dock-yards, it might lessen it 200_l._ more; he added, that he thinks it more necessary to correct the evil in those parts, as it has a direct tendency to corrupt and destroy the very vitals of the Constitution, the lives of the useful seamen, who by means of these houses become the objects of plunder as long as they have any money, and are induced to become robbers when they have none; and he informed the Committee that there is another great evil which is the cause of these disorders, namely, the immense number of common prostitutes, who, mostly from necessity, infest the streets of the City and Liberty of Westminster and parts adjacent, attended by common soldiers and other bullies to protect them from the civil power; these prostitutes, when they have secured the unwary customers, lead them to some of the aforesaid taverns, from whence they seldom escape without being robbed. The cause of this evil, as he apprehends, is the great difficulty, as the Law now stands, to punish those offenders, they being, as common prostitutes, scarce, if at all, within the description of any Statute now in being; and he added, that this subjects watchmen, round-house keepers, constables, and even the Magistrates themselves to prosecutions from low Attorneys; that the remedy in his opinion should be to declare, that persons walking or plying in the said streets for lewd purposes after the watch is set, standing at the doors, or appearing at the windows of such taverns in an indecent manner for lewd purposes, shall be considered as vagrants, and punished as such.