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 yet the people continue, like the French and Italians, temperate ; and drunkenness may be a rare crime—-even among men whose business is pleasure, and who set at defiance all laws human and divine. On the contrary the whole history of distilled spirits proves to a demonstration, that even under the shackles of heavy duties and high prices, distilled spirits stamp every country intemperate where they are commonly used— that they cannot be moderately used as a common beverage by the population of any country, even though, like the Scotch, they are educated and religious; and that in proportion to the quantity of distilled spirits used, will be the amount of pauperism, and crime, and madness, and disease, and premature mortality. No friend of Temperance Societies, so far as I know, has attempted to argue that wine in its pure state is different now from what it was eighteen centuries ago, or different in England from what it is in Judea ; but I, among others, have maintained that the wines in common use in these countries are mixed with considerable portions of distilled spirits, and therefore must he widely different from those spoken of in the bible, which were only “the pure blood of the grape, the simple product of fermentation. The wines in common use now are three times stronger than those used in 1750. Our ales, also, in various places, are becoming frightfully strong ; and the general use of ardent spirits has led to the establishment of a standard of