This may be said to complete one period of wine-history in this country. Another dates from 1825, when the duties on Peninsular wines were lowered to 4s. 6d., and those of France to 7s. 2d. Here the tendency to moderation in drinking which had set in more than overbalanced the cheapened supply, and the revenue for five years stood at about 1 million. În 1831 the invidious distinction between the wines of France and those of the rest of Europe, which had existed from the time of William III., was abolished, and an equal duty of 5s. 6d. imposed on all alike. But again the same result in principle showed itself. The increase in the consumption hardly balanced the small decrease in the tax, and, despite still more rapidlyaugmenting wealth and population, the revenue from wine, up to 1854, remained stationary at an average of something under two millions.

Or the sum may be worked in another way; for the same facts have been illustrated by calculations based on averages of years and of population. It is computed, for instance, that, from 1785 to 1794, with a population of 12 millions, the annual consumption of wine in this country amounted to three bottles per head. During the time of the war, from 1794 up to 1815, with a population averaging 16 millions, the consumption registered between two and three bottles per head. For the ten years after the peace, from 1815 to 1825, it sank to two bottles; from 1825 to 1851, during which years the population rose to above 27 millions-beyond which the calculations do not extend-it averaged little more than one bottle per head.

A statistical panorama is thus unrolled before us, commencing in dark colours, gradually becoming less gloomy, and terminating in refreshing light. We begin by that somewhat disgraceful period of our national history when the upper classes not only indulged in habits of hard drinking, now scarcely credible, but established them as a measure of manliness to which the men of weaker constitution, or higher principle, were compelled to conform as to any other usage of society when, in short, the three bottles per annum per head for the whole population-man, woman and child-meant really the three bottles per diem among a certain hard-riding, swearing, and drinking class.

We thus perceive that with heavier duties on every article of consumption, as well as on wine, these excesses declined. That, far from returning with the return of peace, these habits gave way more and more; and, finally, that despite the double influence of diminished price and increased wealth, the use of wine, reckoned individually, decreased, within seventy years,

fully

fully two-thirds. In this irrefragable proof of a voluntary moderation in the consumption of a tempting and cheapened luxury, we trace the record of that beneficent change in social habits, better home education, and general spread of domestic happiness and manly self-control, which is a truer gauge of a country's prosperity than any fiscal returns.

At the same time we shall be reminded that at the worst period of our squire and gentry convivialities, there was not that abnormal excess which now obtains among our lower classes. Their wines were of an excellent quality, and of far lower alcoholic strength-falling in that respect very much below the strong beers of this day. The hard port-wine drinkers entailed weaker powers on their children, but not the forms of disease now engendered.

*

But we must follow the course of wine a little farther. 1862 ensued that great change in the duties which has undergone no further alteration. All foreign wines, except those of France, are taxed 2s. 6d. per gallon; while French wines, no longer inimically distinguished by higher burdens, are welcomed by a treaty of peace and good-will to the humblest tables at the small impost of 1s. per gallon. This measure was brought forward and carried with the ostensible purpose, not only of placing a cheap light wine within the reach of classes who never before tasted foreign wine of any description, but also to help to draw away even the labouring man from the inordinate use of beer and ardent spirits which had obtained. In 1860 Mr. Gladstone had publicly said, 'Wine is now the rich man's luxury-so was tea a hundred years ago. Let us bring the one, as the other has already been brought, within the scope of the poor.' This accordingly has been done; with such results as we shall presently show.

Meanwhile such a change in the duty immediately told in the figures of consumption. From 1830 to 1854, through all variations of price and increase of population, the demand had been stationary at about 6 million gallons. In 1863 it bounded up at once to 10 million gallons, and by 1873 it had risen to just 18 million. There is no need to dwell on the effect of this increased consumption upon the habits and manners of the educated classes. Nor will the increase of about one-tenth of the population go far to qualify the fact of a trebled consumption. The fact itself requires no qualification. For the greater fact of the non-deterioration in health and morals of those whom the change affects, is patent to all. Our educated

*See Edinburgh Review,' No. 289, p. 150.

ranks may consume about three times more wine than they did---and it would be easy to prove that the lighter wines play the larger part-but society, far from being arrested in its upward course of self-control, has most indubitably continued it. The present generation-their wives, their daughters have little knowledge of drunken brawls; the universities show fewer of the follies of inebriety; gentlemen do not stay late at table or return to the society of ladies in an unbecoming condition; no new drinking-songs have been added to the large repertory bequeathed by former generations; while the tales of intoxication told by our police-courts have little reference to the upper and middle classes. We may, therefore, dismiss the subject of wine as far as it affects the general morals and home habits of the upper strata of the English nation, reserving a vein of secret excess of the saddest character for later mention. It is evident that the increased facility of a cheapened commodity is not more than the good sense of the country can bear, that it has not assumed the form of a general temptation, and that we have nothing to fear on that score. At the same time, the principle we started with, namely, that wine is a luxury, holds its ground through all varying circumstances, but a luxury now equalized in its use; numbers now drinking it in moderation who never drank before; and many drinking little where their fathers had drunk too much.

We now turn to the history of the poor as connected with our subject; though that word 'poor' is strangely contradicted by the wealth of which they give evidence in one form of expenditure. The history of Drink' here tends unhappily in an opposite direction to that we have been considering. The Englishman, as we have hinted, has always been a beer-drinking animal, and small blame to him; it is the product of his native land; the easy manufacture of his own humble home; and, in manly moderation, the best quencher of thirst and repairer of exhaustion. But as we pen these definitions we are conscious of a certain irony lurking in them. As things now stand with our working-man, exhaustion from honest labour by no means accounts for all his thirst. Home is a word which too often loses its real meaning when connected with himself; and manly moderation is a virtue of which he has not the remotest conception. Equally as it is a fiction to call that man poor who leads a life of habitual indulgence in an expensive luxury, so is it a mockery to credit him with any of the attributes of lowly station, simple habits, or narrow means. The characteristics of the upper and lower classes are indeed fast being reversed now-a-days. 'Drunk as a lord,' was the intelligible,

however

however disgraceful, saying of the olden time; now it is 'drunk as a beggar,' and no one will dispute the justice of the appellation. There must be reasons of great cogency for this topsyturvy rottenness in our State. In a certain degree the parallel, in the article of drink,' between the two classes, as far as they have been influenced by legislative measures, holds good; for the increased facilities for indulgence have been common to both. How comes it, then, that the effects have been so opposite? Many of the middle and even highest classes work as hard as the lowest; the work of the brain instead of that of the hands; the expenditure of force in phosphorus instead of in carbon; each force equally needing to be repaired, and each man having the same temptation to exceed his need; while the counterbalancing check of limited means must be abstractedly supposed to act more availingly on the part of the artisan or labourer than on any class above him. But here we are overlooking two important differences in the comparison. The temptation, though common up to a certain point to both, is, for patent reasons, infinitely stronger on the part of the poor man; while his powers of resistance, owing to causes which have undermined his self-dependence and self-respect, have become immeasurably weaker. In short, there is enough to account for diversities of effect, even from causes partially similar; both in the mal-government of the poor on the part of the Legislature in the special matter of 'drink,' and in that gradual course of miseducation which has been the result of a gigantic system of false charity. We will look first at the mal-government of the poor as regards the special subject of drink.'

In no respect have such fatal mistakes been committed in those aims to study the comfort and ease of the lower orders, which are the constant thought and occupation of the governing classes, as in such as affect the great virtue of Sobriety. In the main body of our people this is no longer considered a virtue, either in profession or practice. While those they call The Rich' have so far abjured excess in spirituous liquors that a drunken man of that class is a sight most of our children, thank God, have never seen; those we call The Poor' have gone so much in the opposite direction that no humble home is safe from the degrading spectacle. The vice of drunkenness-rightly defined by the ancient Swedes as 'the disgrace of man and the mother of misery'-has spread over the length and breadth of our land, pervading country as well as town, agricultural as well as commercial districts, army as well as navy; sparing the young as little as the old, the woman scarcely less than the man; the destroyer of all health and

virtue, the breeder of all sickness and sin; filling every haunt of vice, every prison for crime, every hospital for sickness and accident, every asylum for madness. No foul epidemic ever raged more, periodically, than this permanently; no malignant plant ever seeded and propagated itself with more fatal rapidity and abundance. The very Acts of our Legislature, directed ostensibly to stem the evil, have only swollen it. In the first quarter of this century the temptation to the excessive drinking of ardent spirits afforded by the public-houses, called for legislative interference, and in 1830 that Beer-house Bill which appointed a secondary class of drink-places, and which, by a strange obliquity of reasoning, required the beer to be drunk in the Beer-shop, was passed. This Act simply added fuel to fire, and may be justly credited with the boundless increase of that it was intended to modify. The Act itself, with its accompanying condition, was short-sighted and injudicious enough, while the working of it by placing the power of granting licences for small prices in the hands of the Excise, left the country at the mercy of the department most interested in multiplying the number of these shops, whilst ignoring the character of those who applied for them. It would be useless to cite averages and computations of what is now drunk and spent in drink in this country. Billions of gallons and millions of pounds fail, from their very enormity, to convey definite ideas. The true statistics are those of Crime-the records of the Calendar, rather than those of the Exchequer or the Excise. The common police courts of London for one week suffice to prove what the last forty years and upwards have brought upon our country. The very reformation of the higher classes has helped to blind them to the magnitude of the evil. We live, as respects the vice of drunkenness, in an age of the direst iniquity; of the oppression of the weak by the strong, of the demoralization of the innocent by the vile; but we live, with few exceptions, in a charmed circle. Occasionally the intelligence that the cook is lying curiously asleep upon the kitchen floor,-guests perhaps expected to dinner,-startles our serenity by interrupting our comfort; or the report of a fearful outrage, in which murderer and murdered, and all who looked, or hounded on, were alike drunk, raises a passing horror; or we are distressed by the pressing demands of a poverty, which the more it is relieved the more it seems to grow; but otherwise we know as little of those teeming millions to whom such excesses are familiar as of the inhabitants of the planet Saturn.

It was in 1869 that the Lower House of Church Convocation instituted an inquiry, better late than never, on the subject of Vol. 139.-No. 278.

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