orce
of a Parliamentary movement. Sometimes it is the widow. But that
personality has been used to exhaustion. It would be sweating in the
cruellest sense of the word, overtime of the grossest description, to
bring the widow out again so soon. She must have a rest for a bit; so
instead of the widow we have the market-gardener--the market-gardener
liable to be disturbed on the outskirts of great cities, if the
population of those cities expands, if the area which they require for
their health and daily life should become larger than it is at
present.

I should like to point out to the Committee that the right hon.
gentleman, in using this argument about the market-gardener,
recognises very clearly--and I think beyond the possibility of a
withdrawal--the possibility of these cities expanding and taking up a
larger area of ground in consequence of the kind of taxation which my
right hon. friend in his land taxes seeks to impose. But let that
pass. What is the position disclosed by the argument? On the one hand
we have one hundred and twenty thousand persons in Glasgow occupying
one-room tenements; on the other, the land of Scotland. Between the
two stands the market-gardener, and we are solemnly invited, for the
sake of the market-gardener, to keep that great population congested
within limits that are unnatural and restricted to an annual supply of
land which can bear no relation whatever to their physical, social,
and economic needs--and all for the sake of the market-gardener, who
can perfectly well move farther out as the city spreads, and who would
not really be in the least injured.

We take the view that land cannot be regarded as an ordinary
commodity, nor are we prepared to place publicans' licences in the
same position as ordinary property. A licence is a gift from the
State, and the licensed trade is subject to special restrictions and
special taxation; this has been recognised by all parties and by all
Governments. The position in regard to licences, as we know perfectly
well, has been sensibly and, indeed, entirely altered in the course of
the last few years. We have seen the assertion on the part of the
licensed trade of their right to convert their annual tenancy of a
licence from what it has been understood to be, to a freehold, and in
that position they must face the logical consequences of the arguments
they have used and of their action. If there are any hardships to them
in the taxation proposed, let