1892 Drinks of the world

DRINKS.

132

Success to recommend its virtues vast To late posterity.

Lord

In

Hervey, describing the state of

1736

England, says : The drunkenness of the common people was so universal by the retailing a liquor called Gin, wuth which they could get drunk for a groat, that the whole town of London and many towns in the country swarmed with drunken people from morning till night, and were more like a scene of a Bacchanal than the residence of a civil society. Retailers exhibited placards in their windows, in- timating that people might get drunk for the sum of id. and that clean straw would be provided for customers in the most comfortable of cellars. On Feb. 20, 1736, in the ninth year of George II., a petition of the Justices of the Peace for Middlesex against the excessive use of spirituous liquors was presented to the House of Commons, setting forth- That the drinking of Geneva and other distilled spirit uous liquors had greatly increased, especially among the people of inferior rank, that the constant and excessive use thereof had destroyed thousands of his Majesty's subjects, debauching their morals, etc., that the " pernicious liquor " was then sold not only by the distillers and Geneva shops, but many other persons of inferior trades, *'by which means journeymen, apprentices and servants were drawn in to taste and by degrees to like, approve, and immoderately to drink thereof," and that the petitioners therefore prayed that the House would take the premises into their serious consideration, etc. The House having