Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/395

Rh wet, temperate climate of England people might drink heavily of beer or wine, and still in fair measure retain their health and their capacity for work; but, under the reign of gin, vice and misery and disease increased so fearfully that Parliament finally passed a law practically prohibiting its use.

This famous "Gin Law," passed in 1736, is interesting as the earliest severe blow at liquor dealing among civilized nations. It levied a tax of twenty shillings a gallon on spirits, and a license of fifty pounds for any one selling or dealing in it. And, being in advance of public opinion, it failed much as other, more stringent, prohibition laws have failed in our own day. For the cry was at once raised that it taxed the poor man's gin, and let the rich man's wine go free. Every wit, every caricaturist, had his fling at it. Ballads were hawked round, telling of the approaching death of Mother Gin. The liquor shops were hung with black, and celebrated uproariously Madame Geneva's lying in state, her funeral, her wake, and so on. The night before the law went into effect, so the contemporary journals say, there was a universal revel all over the country. Every one drank his fill, and carried home as much gin, besides, as he could pay for.

To evade the law, apothecaries sold it in vials and small packages, sometimes colored and disguised, generally under false labels, such as "Colic Water," "Make Shift," "Ladies' Delight." There were printed directions on some of these packages—e. g., "Take two or three spoonfuls three or four times a day, or as often as the fit takes you." Informers were very prominent and exceedingly offensive, inventing snares to catch lawbreakers for the sake of the heavy rewards, and spying and sneaking around in a way particularly distasteful to the English mind. In consequence, they suffered in their turn. The mere cry "Liquor spy!" was enough to raise a mob in the London streets, and the informer was lucky if he escaped with a sound thrashing and a ducking in the Thames or the nearest horse pond. Indeed, such an outcry was made about the matter that the ministry became very unpopular, and the law was not enforced after two or three years, and was largely modified in 1743, after seven years' trial.

While the lower classes in England were thus being demoralized by gin, the upper classes were suffering almost as much from the introduction of the strong, sweet, fiery, heavily brandied wines of Portugal, thanks, in part at least, to some favoring clauses in the Methuen treaty, early in the eighteenth century. It is curious to read in the contemporary journals and diaries and in the histories and descriptions of the last century—as, for instance, in Trevelyan's Life of Fox—how terribly demoralized was the state of English society during the period of England's greatest colonial and material expansion. The country was