Excerpt from The Gothenburg Licensing System, and Its Proposed Adaptation to Scotland, by the Spirituous Liquors (Scotland) Bill: A Lecture

To guide us in judging of what measures are likely to prove bene ficial, there can be no more valuable aid than the experience of. Nations in similar circumstances and the more closely a country resembles our own in race, climate, and habits, the more valuable will its experience be. The experience of no country is more directly applicable to Scot land than that of Sweden. The Swedes are of the same great family as the English and Lowland Scotch their climate is severe, and their national taste, still more than that of the Scotch, is for alcohol in its most concentrated form - ardent spirits.

I propose to lay before you some account of legislation in Sweden respecting the sale of liquor, and its results 3 and, in particular, I shall ask your attention to the public-house system which originated in Gothenburg. I have felt some difficulty as to the amount of knowledge on the subject of which I should assume my hearers to be in possession. Had the lecture taken place a year ago, the subject would have been almost wholly novel. In the last twelve months, the Gothenburg system has been extensively discussed by the press, and a paper has been widely read, written by a gentleman whose long residence in Gothenburg enabled him to give the most thorough information - Mr Carnegie of Stronvar. To go at length into the history of the Gothen burg movement would be merely to repeat what has been better said by Mr Carnegie, and is no doubt familiar to many, if not to most, of those now present. I shall accordingly content myself with such a sketch of the Gothenburg system as will, I hope, without exhausting the patience of those who have already studied the subject, enable those who have no previous acquaintance with it to appreciate some important facts in relation to that system which have occurred since Mr Carnegie's paper was published; and I shall then endeavour to give some account of the mode in which it is proposed to adapt the system to Scotland.

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