Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/396

384 by a small, wealthy, land-owning aristocracy, who seemed to take the most unbridled corruption in public, and the most unrestrained dissipation in private life as a matter of course. It was from the long years of peace under the Walpoles, during the first half of the century, when the energy and industry of the middle classes were able to exert themselves, and from the protection of her insular position, that England obtained strength to master her empire, not from any superiority in her governing classes.

For, all during the last century, drunkenness was the rule, not the exception, in all classes of society. In the lower classes it was actually encouraged. Did the troops win a victory, did a prince come of age, "Go home. Jack," would say the master to his servant, "build a big bonfire, and tell the butler to make ye all drunk." It was quite a compliment to call an underling an "honest, drunken fellow." And as for the gentlefolk—well, we can hardly conceive of the state of affairs. It was part of a gentleman's education to learn to carry his port. One, two, three quarts a night was a proper and reasonable supply. After dinner the ladies retired into another room—practice still observed—so that the men should have no embarrassing restraints, and it was a matter of course for them to drink one another under the table as fast as was convenient. In the army and navy, in the learned professions, among the gentry and nobility, and even in the royal family, heavy drinking was the rule and not the exception until well on in the present century.

And they suffered from it. Their lives were shortened, their usefulness impaired, their estates squandered, and then the gout! Nowadays, with the example of Palmerston and Bismarck, Gladstone and Sherman before our eyes, it is hard to think of a time when statesmen were incapacitated at thirty-five or forty. But it was so. A gentleman who reached middle age without being crippled was either unusually lucky or was a milksop. Lord Chatham and many, nay most, of his contemporaries were horribly tortured by it. At critical periods in the nation's history a