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The parish priest of Dingle recently stated in court that in a population of seventeen hundred there were over fifty licensed houses, and he rightly declared that all dealings in licences should for the present be only by transfer, and that for five years at least no new licences should be granted.
"Poor Curates, Lecturers and Schoolmasters ... that have been willing to officiate their places without licences" are also his special prey. Sponge admits that he has made many a fat fee by Hunter's procurement. For more serious documents in corroboration see Whitgift's circular to his suffragans in May, 1601, and also his address to his bishops a few months later in Strype, Whitgift, ii, 447 ff.
In those provinces, so industrious and energetic, the disgust was likely to be most easily awakened for a system under which so many friars battened in luxury upon the toils of others, contributing nothing to the taxation, nor to the military defence of the country, exercising no productive avocation, except their trade in indulgences, and squandering in taverns and brothels the annual sums derived from their traffic in licences to commit murder, incest, and every other crime known to humanity.
Napoleon thought, rightly, that he could ruin the English, a manufacturing and trading nation, by preventing their commerce with the European continent; but the execution of this gigantic project offered so much difficulty, that it was only in France that the restrictions were enforced, and there the use of licences, to which I have referred above, made an enormous breach in the regulations.
Privacy beyond the house might be made a privilege to be paid for in proportion to the area occupied, and the tax on these licences of privacy might increase as the square of the area affected. A maximum fraction of private enclosure for each urban and suburban square mile could be fixed.
Such stamp duties as those upon licences to retail ale, wine, and spiritous liquors, though intended, perhaps, to fall upon the profits of the retailers, are likewise finally paid by the consumers of those liquors.
But, for the sake of revenue as well as to obtain supplies, it had become the practice of the Viceroy to sell licences, enabling British merchants to employ British vessels in the Spanish Colonial trade. These had to load in some port in Spain, and were there furnished with legalized Spanish papers.
The royal princesses and their trains stood waiting to follow the queen to the chapel: but, strangely enough, this was the hour appointed for signing deeds of gift on the part of the queen. These gifts were too often licences for the exclusive sale of articles which all should have been left free to sell.
Beer had failed. Who would have guessed that beer could fail in England? The wisest, the most prudent men in Lombard Street had put their trust in beer, as the last grand bulwark of the nation; and even beer had failed. The foundations of England's greatness were, if not gone, going. Insufficient to argue bad management, indiscreet purchases of licences at inflated prices!
Some petty riots among the manufacturing population of the county of Derby were magnified in his eyes into symptoms of an approaching revolution in England; the consequence, as he flattered himself, of the misery inflicted on his great enemy by the "continental system"; and to the end he continued to think that, had he resisted the temptation to enrich his own exchequer by the produce of licences, such must have been the ultimate issue of his original scheme.
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