Why does not the London County Council abandon its “Settled Temperance Policy” and go as straight for municipal public houses as it has gone for municipal trams? The common answer is that the Council has no power to run public houses; but this is no answer at all. Till this year it had no power to run steamers on the Thames. But it wanted the power, it agitated for it, embodied it in its Bills and eventually forced a Tory House of Commons to concede it. Has it ever asked for power to run public houses? Not once. Moreover, even as things stand, it could if it pleased get to work on the right lines instead of on the wrong ones. Instead of abandoning licenses it could retain them and lease the new houses to publicans at pretty high ground rents and on stringent conditions such as would insure that the house should be of the best type possible under private management. Besides there is Earl Grey’s Trust, an organisation founded expressly to anticipate most of the results of municipalism. They could easily have let the Trust take over the licenses, but they have persistently refused to do so. The fact is that the London Progressives do not want to municipalise the retail liquour trade. They do not want to do it, because they dread the power of the Nonconformist chapel and the forces which find their political rallying ground in the local P.S.A., forces of which the guiding principle is not temperance, but a hatred of alcohol _per se_. But surely it is possible to make a last appeal to the Progressive leaders. After all they have pricked that bubble once. To their eternal credit they have defied and bitterly offended the chapels over the education question, and no very dire consequences have followed. Will they not take their courage in their hands and defy them on the drink question also? “RETRENCHMENT AND REFORM.”