Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/400

388 This rum was the basis not only of "flip," when mixed with beer, molasses, dried pumpkin, and sometimes cream and eggs, and stirred, before serving, with a red-hot poker, but also of punch. This latter, named after an East Indian word meaning five, was concocted with sugar, spices, lemon juice, and water, and was imbibed freely. As early as 1686 we find travelers telling of noble bowls of punch, which were passed from hand to hand before dinner. Double and "thribble" bowls there were also, holding two or three quarts each, and the amounts that our ancestors disposed of in those days are staggering.

For liquor was not only used at dinner and supper parties; it was taken morning, noon, and night, as a matter of course. The laborer would not work at the harvest, the builders at their trades, without a liberal allowance of rum. It did not matter, either, what class of work they were doing. When the little town of Medfield, early in the last century, "raised" the new meeting house, there were required "four barrels beer, twenty-four gallons West Indian rum, thirty gallons New England rum, thirty-five pounds loaf sugar, twenty-five pounds brown sugar, and four hundred and sixty-five lemons." A house could not be built without liquor being distributed at every stage of the operation, and this practice was not obsolete till well on in this century.

The clergy, while keeping a strict eye upon the excesses of their parishioners, did not disdain a drop themselves, and their conventions rivaled the dinners of the non-elect. In 1792 Governor Hancock gave a dinner to the FusileersFusiliers [sic] at the Merchants' Club in Boston, and for eighty diners there were served one hundred and thirty-six bowls of punch, twenty-one bottles of sherry, and lots of cider and brandy. But a similar bill is preserved for the refreshments at the ordination of a clergyman at Beverly, Mass., in 1785, and we notice:

It would be but useless repetition to discuss the drinking habits of New York and other colonies. It is enough to say that well on into the present century drunkenness was extremely common, and, when people could afford it, a most pardonable and venial offense. It is the pride of our civilization in the present century that, during the last fifty or seventy-five years, the whole