drink was at once and irrevocably planted in the nation. The average of British spirits distilled, which is said to have been only 527,000 gallons in 1684, and 2,000,000 in 1714, had risen in 1727 to 3,601,000, and in 1735 to 5,394,000 gallons. Physicians declared that, in excessive gindrinking, a new and terrible source of mortality had been opened for the poor. The grand jury of Middlesex, in a powerful presentment, declared that much the greater part of the poverty, the murders, the robberies of London, might be traced to this single cause. Retailers of gin were accustomed to hang out painted boards announcing that their customers could be made drunk for a penny, and dead drunk for twopence, and should have straw for nothing; and cellars strewn with straw were accordingly provided, into which those who had become insensible were dragged, and where they remained until they had sufficiently recovered to renew their orgies. The evil acquired such fearful dimensions that even the unreforming Parliament of Walpole perceived the necessity of taking strong measures to arrest it, and in 1736 Sir J. Jekyll brought in and carried a measure, to which Walpole reluctantly assented, imposing a duty of twenty shillings a gallon on all spirituous liquors, and prohibiting any person from selling them in less quantity than two gallons without paying a tax of £50 a year.

Such a scale, if it could have been maintained, would have almost amounted to prohibition; but the passion for the liquor was now too widely spread to be arrested by law. Violent riots ensued. In 1737, it is true, the consumption rose to 3,500,000 gallons; but, as Walpole had predicted, a clandestine retail trade soon sprang up, which, being at once very lucrative and very popular, increased to such an extent that it was found impossible to restrain it. In 1742 more than 7,000,000 gallons were distilled, and the consumption was steadily augmenting. The measure of 1736 being plainly inoperative, an attempt was made in 1743 to suppress the clandestine trade, and at the same time to increase the public revenue, by a bill lowering the duty on most kinds of liquor to 1d. per gallon, levied at the still-head, and at the same time reducing the price of retail licenses from £50 to 20s. The bill was carried in spite of the strenuous opposition of Chesterfield, Lord Hervey, and the whole bench of Bishops; and, while it did nothing to discourage drunkenness, it appears to have had little or no effect on smuggling. In 1749 more than 4,000 persons were convicted of selling spirituous liquors without a license, and the number of private gin-shops, within the Bills of Mortality, was estimated at more than 17,000. At the same time crime and immorality of every description were rapidly increasing.

The city of London urgently petitioned for new measures of restriction. The London physicians stated that in 1750 there were in and about the

metropolis no less than 14,000 cases of illness, most of them beyond the reach of medicine, directly attributable to gin. Fielding, in his wellknown pamphlet, "On the Late Increase of Robbers," which was published in 1751, ascribed that evil, in a great degree, "to a new kind of drunkenness unknown to our ancestors," and declared that gin was "the principal sustenance (if it may be so called) of more than 100,000 people

in the metropolis," and he predicted that "should the drinking of this poison be continued at its present height, during the next twenty years, there will by that time be very few of the common people left to drink it." It was computed that in 1750 and 1751 more than 11,000,000 of gallons were annually consumed, and the increase in population, especially

in London, appears to have been perceptibly checked. Bishop Benson, in a letter written from London a little later, said: "There is not only no safety in living in this town, but scarcely any in the country now, robbery and murder are grown so frequent. Our people are now becoming what they never before were, cruel and inhuman. Those accursed spirituous liquors, which, to the shame of our government, are so easily to be had and in such quantities drunk, have changed the very nature of our people; and they will, if continued to be drunk, destroy the very race of people themselves."

In 1751, however, some new and stringent measures were carried under the Pelham ministry, which had a real and very considerable effect. Distillers were prohibited, under a penalty of £10, from either retailing spiritous liquors themselves, or selling to unlicensed retailers. Debts contracted for liquors, not amounting to twenty shillings at a time, were made irrecoverable by law. Retail licenses were conceded only to £19 householders under the Bills of Mortality, and to traders who were subject to certain parochial rates without them, and the penalties for unlicensed retailing were greatly increased. For the second offense the clandestine dealer was liable to three months' imprisonment and whipping; for the third offense he incurred the penalty of transportation. Two years later another useful law was carried, restricting the liberty of magistrates in issuing licenses, and subjecting public houses to severe regulations. Though much less ambitious than the Act of 1736, these measures were far more efficacious, and they form a striking instance of the manner in which legislation, if not overstrained or ill-timed, can improve the morals of a people. Among other consequences of the Acts, it may be observed that dropsy, which had risen in London to a wholly unprecedented point between 1718 and 1751, immediately diminished, and the diminution was ascribed by physicians to the marked decrease of drunkenness in the community. Still these measures formed a palliation and not a cure, and from the early years of the eighteenth century gin-drinking has never ceased to be the main counteracting influence to the moral, intellectual, and physical benefits that might be expected from increased commercial prosperity. Of all the pictures of Hogarth none are more impressive than those where he represents the different conditions of a people whose natural beverage is beer, and of a people who are addicted to gin; and the contrast exhibits in its most unfavorable aspect the difference between the Hanoverian period and that which preceded it.

In the year 1751 the measures of the English government were more successful in restraining the use of distilled spirits,

and the nation returned to the consumption of the usual quantity of ale.

In an old magazine, printed in 1789, the writer, speaking of the persons whose habit it was to resort to the various "teagardens," near London, on a Sunday, calculated them to amount to two hundred thousand. Of these he considers that not one would go away without having spent half a crown, and consequently £25,000 would have been spent in the course of a day. Twenty-five thousand multiplied by the number of Sundays in a year gives, as the annual consumption of that day of rest, the immense sum of £1,300,000. The writer calculates the returning situation of these persons as follows: sober, fifty thousand; in high glee, ninety thousand; drunkish, thirty thousand; staggering tipsy, ten thousand; muzzy, fifteen thousand; dead-drunk, five thousand-total, two hundred thousand.

About this time hackney coachmen in London carried on a lucrative business by going with their vehicles through the streets, during the night, in order to take home drunken gentlemen who had been overcome with drink, under the rules of hospitality, at places of entertainment, and were staggering homeward or lying in the street, who next day paid them liberally for their pains.'

A writer in the second volume of the "Glasgow Temperance Record" says: "From this time, 1751, until the removal of the restrictions on the sale of gin, in 1825, beer continued to be the favorite drink of the English workmen; but, immediately, on the nation being again exposed, with all its ale-quaffing habits, to the light, diffusive, and agreeable stimulus of distilled spirits, it fell; the thirst for the new liquor spreading with all the rapidity of lightning."

Drunkenness in Scotland steadily increased from 1800 to 1822; but, after the latter date, when the duty on spirits was reduced from 7s. to 2s. 10d. per Scotch gallon, a much greater

1 Chambers' "Miscellany."

and more decided increase took place. It was at first thought that the novelty of cheap whisky would produce only a sudden ebullition of drunkenness which would soon wear off; but in this they were disappointed. The increase in spirit drinking kept on, from year to year, until it reached its climax in 1830, the consumption increasing from 2,079,000 gallons in 1822, to 5,777,000 in 1830.

In England and Wales, in 1825, the duty on spirits was lowered from 12s. 7d. to 7s. per gallon. Mark the effects:

When this great increase in the consumption of distilled spirits became apparent, and the corresponding increase of crime as indicated by the above statistics, the leading statesmen of England thought the evils of intemperance might be stayed by affording greater facilities for the sale of beer. There had been loud complaints of the monopoly of the brewers. By means of their wealth they had obtained the exclusive privilege not only of brewing but also of retailing beer. They owned large and overwhelming shares in the public houses. The brewer's beer was sold in the brewer's retail shop, the keeper of which called himself a "licensed victualer." The keeper was wholly at the mercy of the affluent brewer, for he could not go into the market, as the miller and the baker did.

To meet this difficulty, in 1830, Parliament passed an "Act to permit the general sale of beer in England and Wales." This allowed every body to sell beer without any license at all, provided two others, householders, would certify to the Excise

1 After the change.