publican, and because the place was not required. Thereupon the brewer who owned the building opened it as a club, making the former publican manager. The rules were carefully drawn up, with the aid of counsel, to keep the house open to as many as possible; an entrance fee of a few pence was fixed; and the club was in a position to accommodate almost all its old customers. It had not to observe any of the regulations imposed on the regular drink shops, and consequently did twice as much business as before its licence was taken away. Such instances might be multiplied indefinitely, but there is no need; for to all who know anything of the inner life of our great cities these things are commonplaces. How to deal with these bogus establishments, and yet not at the same time to unduly interfere with genuine clubs, has become an urgent and serious question. The Royal Commission on the Sunday Closing (Wales) Act recommended that all clubs where intoxicating liquors are sold should be registered with the local authority, and that the register should be open for the inspection of the police. The Commission was also strongly of opinion that "clubs which exist only for the purpose of supplying drink, or only colourably for some other purpose, should be declared absolutely illegal". When Lord Randolph Churchill brought his licensing scheme before the House of Commons, he incorporated with it clauses for the registration and taxation of clubs, as has already been described in the previous chapter. The Bishop of London's Bill in 1893 contained similar clauses, but neither measure ever got beyond the initial stages. _The Clubs Registration Bill_, as amended by a Select Committee of the House of Commons last year, provided (1) that every club (with certain strictly defined exceptions) selling intoxicating liquors on unlicensed premises must be registered; (2) that it shall only be managed in accordance with its registered constitution; and (3) that an annual return shall be made of the members of the club. There were further provisions forbidding the sale of any drink to be taken from the club premises, preventing any person under eighteen years old becoming a member of the club, and limiting the number of honorary members to one for every twenty ordinary members. The Bill applied only to England, and was admitted by its supporters to be miserably inadequate; but it would have been a great improvement, had it passed into law, on the present state of affairs. However, it went the usual way of Bills in that barren Session.