English politics, its importance lies much more in the silent and almost insensible growth of Parliamentary government than in distinct remedial measures. The measures of reform that were actually passed were usually such as were almost imperatively demanded by critical circumstances, or by the growth of some great evil in the nation. Some of them were of great importance. The rebellion of 1745 made it absolutely necessary to put an end to the anarchy of the Highlands, and to the almost complete independence which enabled the Highland chief to defy the law, and to rally around him in a few days, and in any cause, a considerable body of armed men. The Acts for the abolition of hereditary jurisdictions, for disarming the Highlanders, and for depriving them of their national dress, were carried with this object, and the first, which made the English law supreme throughout the island, has, as we shall see in another chapter, proved one of the most important measures in Scotch history, the chief cause of the rapid progress of Scotland in wealth and civilisation.

Another measure of the Pelham ministry was intended to check a still graver evil than Highland anarchy. The habit of gin-drinking-the master curse of English life, to which most of the crime and an immense proportion of the misery of the nation may be ascribed-if it did not absolutely originate, at least became for the first time a national vice, in the early Hanoverian period. Drunkenness, it is true, had long been common, though Camden maintained that in his day it was still a recent vice, that there had been a time when the English were of all the Northern nations the most commended for their sobriety,' and that they first learnt in their wars in the Netherlands to drown themselves with immoderate drinking.' The Dutch and German origin of many drinking terms lends some colour to this assertion, and it is corroborated by other evidence. Superfluity of drink,' wrote Tom Nash in the reign of Elizabeth, is a sin that ever since we have mixed ourselves with the Low Countries is counted honourable; but, before we knew their lingering wars, was held in the highest degree of hatred that might be.' As the English,' said Chamberlayne, returning from the wars in the Holy Land brought home the foul disease of leprosy. . . . so in our fathers' days the English

6

1 Camden's Hist. of Elizabeth, A.D. 1581.

6

returning from the service in the Netherlands brought with
them the foul vice of drunkenness.' But the evil, if it was not
indigenous in England,' at least spread very rapidly and very
widely. In England,' said Iago, they are most potent in
potting. Your Dane, your German, and your swag-bellied
Hollander are nothing to your English.' We seem,' wrote a
somewhat rhetorical writer in 1657, to be steeped in liquors,
or to be the dizzy island. We drink as if we were nothing but
sponges
or had tunnels in our mouths. . . . We are the
grape-suckers of the earth.'3 The dissipated habits of the
Restoration, and especially the growing custom of drinking
toasts, greatly increased the evil, but it was noticed that the
introduction of coffee, which spread widely through England
in the last years of the seventeenth century, had a perceptible in-
fluence in diminishing it, and among the upper classes drunken-
ness was, perhaps, never quite so general as between the time of
Elizabeth and the Revolution. French wines were the favourite
drink, but the war of the Revolution for a time almost excluded
them, and the Methuen Treaty of 1703, which admitted the
wines of Portugal at a duty of one-third less than those of
France, gradually produced a complete change in the national
taste. This change was, however, not fully accomplished for
nearly a century, and it was remarked that in the reign of Anne
the desire to obtain French wines at a reasonable rate greatly
strengthened the opposition to Marlborough and the war.5
The amount of hard drinking among the upper classes was still
very great, and it is remarkable how many of the most con-
spicuous characters were addicted to it. Addison, the foremost
moralist of his time, was not free from it.6 Oxford, whose
private character was in most respects singularly high, is said
to have come, not unfrequently, drunk into the very presence of
the Queen. Bolingbroke, when in office, sat up whole nights

drinking, and in the morning, having bound a wet napkin round his forehead and his eyes, to drive away the effects of his intemperance, he hastened, without sleep, to his official business.1 When Walpole was a young man his father was accustomed to pour into his glass a double portion of wine, saying, "Come, Robert, you shall drink twice while I drink once; for I will not permit the son in his sober senses to be witness of the intoxication of his father.' This education produced its natural fruits, and the entertainments of the minister at Houghton were the scandal of his county, and often drove Lord Townshend from his neighbouring seat of Rainham. The brilliant intellect of Carteret was clouded by drink, and even Pulteney, who appears in his later years to have had stronger religious convictions than any other politician of his time, is said to have shortened his life by the same means.1

2

Among the poor, however, in the beginning of the eighteenth century, the popular beverage was still beer or ale, the use of which--especially before the art of noxious adulteration was brought to its present perfection-has always been more common than the abuse. The consumption appears to have been amazing. It was computed in 1688 that no less than 12,400,000 barrels were brewed in England in a single year, though the entire population probably little exceeded 5,000,000. In 1695, with a somewhat heavier excise it sank to 11,350,000 barrels, but even then almost a third part of the arable land of the kingdom was devoted to barley.5 Under Charles I. a company was formed with the sole right of making spirits and vinegar in the cities of London and Westminster and within twenty-one miles of the same, but this measure had little fruit; the British distilleries up to the time of the Revolution were quite inconsiderable and the brandies which were imported in large quantities from France, were much too expensive to become Mrs. Delany's Correspondence, vi. 168.

2 Coxe's Walpole, i. 5, 758, 759. Chesterfield's Characters.

Speaker Onslow's Remarks (Coxe's Walpole, vol. ii. p. 559).

Gregory King's State of England, pp. 55-56. In an edition of Chamberlayne's Magna Britannia Notitia, published in 1710, it is stated that in 1667, when the greater part of

London was in ashes after the fire, and many of the inhabitants were forced to retire to the country, no less than 1,522,781 barrels of beer and ale were brewed in the city, each of them containing from 32 to 36 gallons, that the amount brewed annually in London had since risen to near two million of barrels, and that the excise for London was farmed out for 120,000l. a year (p. 219).

popular. Partly, however, through hostility to France, and partly in order to encourage the home distilleries, the Government of the Revolution, in 1689, absolutely prohibited the importation of spirits from all foreign countries,' and threw open the trade of distillery, on the payment of certain duties, to all its subjects. These measures laid the foundation of the great extension of the English manufacture of spirits, but it was not till about 1724 that the passion for gin-drinking appears to have infected the masses of the population, and it spread with the rapidity and the violence of an epidemic. Small as is the place which this fact occupies in English history, it was probably, if we consider all the consequences that have flowed from it, the most momentous in that of the eighteenth century-incomparably more so than any event in the purely political or military annals of the country. The fatal passion for 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 till they had sufficiently recovered to renew their orgies. The evil acquired such frightful 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 208. a gallon on all spirituous liquors, and prohibiting any person from selling them in less quantities than pherson's Annals of Commerce, ii. Mac- 639.

1 Parl. Hist., xii. 1212.
2 Ibid., xii. 1211-1214.

two gallons without paying a tax of 50l. a year. Such a scale, if it could have been maintained, would have almost amounted to prohibition, but the passion for these liquors was now too widely spread to be arrested by law. Violent riots ensued. In 1737, it is true, the consumption sank to about 3,600,000 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 spirits to 1d. in the gallon, levied at the still-head, and at the same time reducing the price of retail licences from 50l. to 208. 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 upon smuggling. In 1749 more than 4,000 persons were convicted of selling spirituous liquors without a licence, and the number of the 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 in 1750 that there were, in or 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 well-known 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;' he declared that gin was the principal sustenance (if it may so be 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 millions of gallons of spirits were

19 Geo. II. c. 23.

6

6

2 16 Geo. II. c. 8.