Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/138

134 marked and obvious that to name it is enough. Probably there is not a "respectable" man in Boston who would not be ashamed to have been seen drunk yesterday; even to have been drunk in ever so private a manner; not one who would willingly get a friend or a guest in that condition to-day! Go back a few years, and it brought no public reproach, and, I fear, no private shame. A few years further back, it was not a rare thing, on great occasions, for the fathers of the town to reel and stagger from their intemperance—the magistrates of the land voluntarily furnishing the warning which a romantic historian says the Spartans forced upon their slaves.

It is easy to praise the Fathers of New England; easier to praise them for virtues they did not possess, than to discriminate and fairly judge those remarkable men. I admire and venerate their characters, but they were rather hard drinkers; certainly a love of cold water was not one of their loves. Let me mention a fact or two. It is recorded in the Probate Office, that in 1678, at the funeral of Mrs. Mary Norton, widow of the celebrated John Norton, one of the ministers of the first church in Boston, fifty-one gallons and a half of the best Malaga wine were consumed by the "mourners;" in 1685, at the funeral of the Rev. Thomas Cobbett, minister at Ipswich, 'there were consumed one barrel of wine and two barrels of cider—"and as it was cold," there was " some spice and ginger for the cider." You may easily judge of the drunkenness and riot on occasions less solemn than the funeral of an old and beloved minister. Towns provided intoxicating drink at the funeral of their paupers; in Salem, in 1728, at the funeral of a pauper, a gallon of wine and another of cider are charged as "incidental;" the next year, six gallons of rum on a similar occasion; in Lynn, in 1711, the town furnished "half a barrel of cider for the "Widow Dispaw's funeral." Affairs had come to such a pass, that, in 1742, the General Court forbade the use of wine and rum at funerals. In 1673, Increase Mather published his Wo unto Drunkards. Governor Winthrop complains, in 1630, that "the young folk gave themselves to drink hot waters very immoderately."