But in other directions a wiser legislation found favour. Distillation from grain, malt, or flour was prohibited, and when it was proposed in Parliament to relax this measure, abundant were the petitions for its retention. It was therefore resolved that the law should be in force till December 1759: and the success of the measure is established from the fact that the consumption of spirits in England and Wales fell, from the nineteen millions of 1742, to an annual average of about four millions during the interval between the years 1760 and 1782.
Much is said in the present day of female intemperance. The Lords’ Committee had aroused public attention to the subject. But it was rife enough in the period under discussion. A poet of the century makes no secret of the proclivity.[217]
Britannia this upas-tree bought of Mynheer,
Removed it through Holland and planted it here;
‘Tis now a stock plant of the genus wolf’s bane,
And one of them blossoms in Marybone Lane.
The House that surrounds it stands first in the row,
Two doors at right angles swing open below;
And the children of misery daily steal in,
And the poison they draw they denominate Gin.
There enter the prude, and the reprobate boy,
The mother of grief and the daughter of joy,
The serving-maid slim, and the serving-man stout,
They quickly steal in, and they slowly reel out.
The following incident related in the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1748, points to a terrible condition of things:—
At a christening at Beddington in Surrey, the nurse was so intoxicated that after she had undress’d the child, instead of laying it in the cradle, she put it behind a large fire, which burnt it to death in a few minutes. She was examin’d before a magistrate, and said she was quite stupid and senseless, so that she took the child for a log of wood; on which she was discharged!!
Nor was any class of society exempt from the imputation; but the curtain need not be drawn.
And what a stream of ability and learning was polluted by those mischievous compounds! Men of letters, tragedians, statesmen, fell—ignobly fell—before the insidious destroyer.
Bolingbroke, when in office, sat up whole nights drinking, and in the morning, having bound a wet napkin round his forehead and his eyes, to drive away the effects of his intemperance, he hastened without sleep to his official business.[218]