After all it must be owned that the good and salutary effects of the prohibition were visible in every part of the kingdom, and no evil consequence ensued except a diminution of the revenue in this article [spirits], a consideration which ought at all times to be sacrificed to the health and morals of the people.
And nearly half a century before Smollett, John Disney (magistrate and divine) had written:—
I deny the assertion that the revenue of ye crown will really be impaired by prohibiting tipling & drunkss.... 3 parts in 4 of the pore families in this kingdom have been reduced to want chiefly by haunting Taverns or Ale-houses. Especy labouring men, who very often consume there on the Lord’s day what they have gotten all the week before, & let their families beg or steal for a subsistence the week follg.... Now I suppose you will grant me that as the No. of poor & ruined families encreases in a nation, the Prince that governs must find a proportionable decay in his Revenue. On the other side, all such laws duly executed as keep men by sobriety tempce & frugality in a thriving condition, do most effectually provide for the happiness of the people & for the riches of the Prince.[252]
But there are symptoms of a decline in this source of revenue. A leading London daily paper has lately thus adverted to this momentous menace:—
Official statistics go far to confirm the triumphant claim of total abstainers that the consumption of strong drink is falling off at a rate not distasteful to the philanthropist, but suggesting grave reflection to a Chancellor of the Exchequer. The receipts from beer, wines, and spirits have been estimated in all recent budgets at nearly thirty millions sterling a year, if we add to the excise the customs duties derived from foreign spirits; and, as this amount is considerably more than a third of the entire revenue, any causes that impair its growth or make it decline are of serious importance to the nation. That the revenue from excise is not increasing, but is actually falling behind, despite the change from a malt tax to a beer duty, is indisputable. That temperance habits have made prodigious strides in the last few years is also beyond question. Do the two changes stand to each other in the relation of effect to cause? In other words, is less of beer, spirits, wine consumed because there is a want of inclination, or is it from want of ability? Partly from the latter influence, there is little doubt. Total abstinence is popular with many because it is an aid to health; with others because it is the handmaid of morality and thrift; self-denying persons practise it because it sets an excellent example; and multitudes like it as it is economical.... In so far, then, as the need for retrenchment is one cause of reduced consumption of strong drink, a change in habit and in fashion might be expected to come with increased material prosperity. The nation ‘drank itself out of the Alabama difficulty’ in the exuberant days which saw Mr. Lowe at the Exchequer; and it may yet again take to tippling so heartily as to enable Mr. Childers to dispense with a portion of the income-tax. At present, however, there is not the faintest symptom of this; all the indications point in the other direction. Temperance and total abstinence march from one conquest to another, blessed by bishops, clergy, and even princes of the Christian Churches, patronised by doctors, eulogised by hard-headed men of business, and gathering in everywhere crowds of enthusiastic converts. The movement is sweeping over the nation in an unchecked tide, acquiring force as it goes, and inaugurating not change merely, but social revolution.... Such changes, needless to repeat, bode no good to the English Chancellor Exchequer, who has to sit idly contemplating the gradual running dry of more than one tributary rill, which he is at his wits’ end to replenish from other sources, or to replace by a more reproductive substitute. Perhaps it is too soon to moralise over the passing event, but it will be impossible long to postpone action, and to rest content with mere discussion. If the change we now witness is going to be permanent, that is, if the crusade on behalf of abstinence from strong drink is to proceed with redoubled success next year, Mr. Childers will not only he unable to make any allowance for an elastic growth of the excise receipts, but he will have to prepare for a diminution.
Had the coming event cast its shadow before? Isaac Disraeli long ago predicted a return to sobriety. We shall probably (said he) outlive that custom of hard drinking, which was so long one of our national vices.
Everyone devoutly longs for such a terminus ad quem. But were the former days really better than these? Could we devoutly desire a return to any social era of the past? A pre-Elizabethan dietetic millennium is a retrospective mirage. It was a phantom of the historian Camden, which the elder Disraeli, and others in his wake, have endeavoured to stereotype. Granted, that nations, like individuals, are imitators; granted, that the English in their long wars in the Netherlands learnt to drown themselves in immoderate drinking, and by drinking others’ healths to impair their own; still it is not true that in those wars they ‘first’ learnt such excess, and it is not true that ‘of all the northern nations, they had been before this most commended for their sobriety.’ For at least one thousand years before the Netherland wars, Britain had been stigmatised for intemperance. Gildas had called attention in the sixth century to the fact that laity and clergy slumbered away their time in drunkenness.
S. Boniface (a native of Britain) in the eighth century had written to Cuthbert respecting the vice of drunkenness: ‘This is an evil peculiar to pagans and our race. Neither the Franks, nor the Gauls, nor the Lombards, nor the Romans, nor the Greeks, commit it.’ We have already noticed that the conquest of the English by the Normans has been attributed especially to the then prevailing habit of intemperance: that in the following century John of Salisbury could write: ‘Habits of drinking have made the English famous among all foreign nations.’ How then could the Elizabethan town-wit, Tom Nash, write: ‘Superfluity in drink is a sin that ever since we have mixed ourselves with the Low Countries is counted honourable; but before we knew their lingering wars, was held in that highest degree of hatred that might be’?[253]