that which sees most keenly the defects of existing institutions and the vast additions that may be made to human well-being, form in all large classes of men opposite biases which find their expression in party divisions. The one side rests chiefly on the great truth that one of the first conditions of good government is essential stability, and on the extreme danger of a nation cutting itself off from the traditions of its past, denuding its government of all moral support, and perpetually tampering with the main pillars of the State. The other side rests chiefly upon the no less certain truths that Government is an organic thing, that it must be capable of growing, expanding, and adapting itself to new conditions of thought or of society; that it is subject to grave diseases, which can only be arrested by a constant vigilance, and that its attributes and functions are susceptible of almost infinite variety and extension with the new and various developments of national life. The one side represents the statical, the other the dynamical element in politics. Each can claim for itself a natural affinity to some of the highest qualities of mind and character, and each, perhaps, owes quite as much of its strength to mental and moral disease. Stupidity is naturally Tory. The large classes who are blindly wedded to routine, and are simply incapable of understanding or appreciating new ideas, or the exigencies of changed circumstances, or the conditions of a reformed society, find their natural place in the Tory ranks. Folly, on the other hand, is naturally Liberal. To this side belongs the cast of mind which, having no sense of the infinite complexity and interdependence of political problems, of the part which habit, association, and tradition play in every healthy political organism, and of the multifarious remote and indirect consequences of every institution, is prepared with a light heart and a reckless hand to recast the whole framework of the constitution in the interest of speculation or experiment. The colossal weight of national selfishness gravitates naturally to Toryism. That party rallies round its banner the great multitude who, having made their position, desire merely to keep things as they are, who are pre pared to subordinate their whole policy to the.maintenance of class privileges, who look with cold hearts and apathetic minds on the vast mass of remediable misery and injustice around them, who have never made a serious effort, or perhaps conceived a serious desire, to leave the world in any respect a better place than they found it. Even in the case of reforms which have no natural connection with party politics, and which, by diverting attention from other changes, would be eminently beneficial to the Tories, that party is usually less efficient than its rival, because its leaders are paralysed by the atmosphere of selfishness pervading their ranks, and because most of the reforming and energetic intellects are ranged among their opponents. On the other hand, the acrid humours and more turbulent passions of society flow strongly in the Liberal direction. Envy, which hates every privilege or dignity it does not share, is intensely democratic, and disordered ambitions and dishonest adventurers find their natural place in the party of progress and of change. The Whig Governments, from the accession of George I. to the death of Henry Pelham, only exhibited in a very subdued and diluted form both the virtues and the vices of liberalism; and though this period is very important in the history of English politics, its importance lies much more in the silent and almost insensible growth of Parliamentary government than in distinct remedial measures. The measures of reform that were actually passed were usually such as were almost imperatively demanded by critical circumstances, or by the growth of some great evil in the nation. Some of them were of great importance. The rebellion of 1745 made it absolutely necessary to put an end to the anarchy of the Highlands, and to the almost complete independence which enabled the Highland chief to defy the law, and to rally around him in a few days, The Acts and in any cause, a considerable body of armed men. for the abolition of hereditary jurisdictions, for disarming the Highlanders, and for depriving them of their national dress were carried with this object, and the first, which made the English law supreme throughout the island, has, as we shall see in another chapter, proved one of the most important measures in Scotch history, the chief cause of the rapid progress of Scotland in wealth and civilisation. Another measure of the Pelham ministry was intended to check a still graver evil than Highland anarchy. The habit of gin-drinking-the master curse of English life, to which most of the crime and an immense proportion of the misery of the nation may be ascribed-if it did not absolutely originate, at least became for the first time a national vice, in the early Hanoverian period. Drunkenness, it is true, had long been common, though Camden maintained that in his day it was still a recent vice, that there had been a time when the English were 'of all the Northern nations the most commended for their sobriety,' and that they first learnt in their wars in the Netherlands to drown themselves with immoderate drinking.'1 The Dutch and German origin of many drinking terms lends some colour to this assertion, and it is corroborated by other evidence. Superfluity of drink,' wrote Tom Nash in the reign of Elizabeth, 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 the highest degree of hatred that might be.' 'As the English,' said Chamberlayne, returning from the wars in the Holy Land brought home the foul disease of leprosy. . . . so in our fathers' days the English returning from the service in the Netherlands brought with them the foul vice of drunkenness.' But the evil, if it was not indigenous in England, at least spread very rapidly and very widely. In England,' said Iago, they are most potent in potting. Your Dane, your German, and your swag-bellied Hollander are nothing to your English.' We seem,' wrote a somewhat rhetorical writer in 1657, to be steeped in liquors, 1 Camden's Hist. of Elizabeth, A.D. 1581. * See the early history of English drinking, in Disraeli's Curiosities of 3 Literature; Drinking Customs in or to be the dizzy island. We drink as if we were nothing but sponges .. or had tunnels in our mouths. .. We are the grape-suckers of the earth.'' The dissipated habits of the Restoration, and especially the growing custom of drinking toasts, greatly increased the evil, but it was noticed that the introduction of coffee, which spread widely through England in the last years of the seventeenth century, had a perceptible influence in diminishing it, and among the upper classes drunkenness was, perhaps, never quite so general as between the time of Elizabeth and the Revolution. French wines were the favourite drink, but the war of the Revolution for a time almost excluded them, and the Methuen Treaty of 1703, which admitted the wines of Portugal at a duty of one-third less than those of France, gradually produced a complete change in the national taste. This change was, however, not fully accomplished for nearly a century, and it was remarked that in the reign of Anne the desire to obtain French wines at a reasonable rate greatly strengthened the opposition to Marlborough and the war.3 The amount of hard drinking among the upper classes was still very great, and it is remarkable how many of the most conspicuous characters were addicted to it. Addison, the foremost moralist of his time, was not free from it. Oxford, whose private character was in most respects singularly high, is said to have come, not unfrequently, drunk into the very presence of the Queen. 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, hastened, without sleep, to his official business. 'Reeve's 'Plea for Nineveh,' quoted in Malcolm's Manners and Customs of London, i. p. 286. Chamberlayne. See, too, a curious testimony on this subject quoted in Jesse's London, iii. 250. 3 Cunningham's Hist., ii. pp. 200201. Dr. Radcliffe is said to have ascribed much of the sickness of the time to the want of French wines. See, too, on the history of French Spence. Swift's Correspondence. When Walpole was a young man his father was accustomed to pour into his glass a double portion of wine, saying, 'Come, Robert, you shall drink twice while I drink once; for I will not permit the son in his sober senses to be witness of the intoxication of his father.' This education produced its natural fruits, and the entertainments of the minister at Houghton were the scandal of his county, and often drove Lord Townshend from his neighbouring seat of Rainham.' The brilliant intellect of Carteret was clouded by drink, and even Pulteney, who appears in his later years to have had stronger religious convictions than any other politician of his time, is said to have shortened his life by the same means.3 Among the poor, however, in the beginning of the eighteenth century, the popular beverage was still beer or ale, the use of which--especially before the art of noxious adulteration was brought to its present perfection-has always been more common than the abuse. The consumption appears to have been amazing. It was computed in 1688 that no less than 12,400,000 barrels were brewed in England in a single year, though the entire population probably little exceeded 5,000,000. In 1695, with a somewhat heavier excise it sank to 11,350,000 barrels, but even then almost a third part of the arable land of the kingdom was devoted to barley. Under Charles I. a company was formed with the sole right of making spirits and vinegar in the cities of London and Westminster and within twenty-one miles of the same, but this measure had little fruit; the British distilleries up to the time of the Revolution were quite inconsiderable and the brandies which were imported in large quantities from France, were much too expensive to become Coxe's Walpole, i. 5, 758, 759. 2 Chesterfield's Characters. Speaker Onslow's Remarks (Coxe's Walpole, vol. ii. p. 559). Gregory King's State of England, pp. 55-56. In an edition of Chamberlayne's Magna Britanniæ Notitia, published in 1710, it is stated that in 1667, when the greater part of London was in ashes after the fire, and many of the inhabitants were forced to retire to the country, no less than 1,522,781 barrels of beer and ale were brewed in the city, each of them containing from 32 to 36 gallons, that the amount brewed annually in London had since risen to near two million of barrels, and that the excise for London was farmed out for 120,000l. a year (p. 219). |