Practically, brewing had ceased to exist as an industry before the New England colonies had reached Statehood; it was revived for a short space of time when Alexander Hamilton introduced his revenue system, and many members of Congress, prompted by moral and hygienic considerations, supported his efforts to encourage the manufacture. The spirit of the times as to this question is clearly reflected in the speeches of eminent statesmen and the writings of philosophers, all of whom agreed, to quote the words of the “Digest of Manufactures” and of Gallatin, that “the moralizing tendency and salubrious nature of fermented liquors recommend them to serious consideration.” But neither such sentiments nor the positive labors of Dr. Benjamin Rush, who aimed at the popularization of beer through the total exclusion of ardent spirits, could prevail against the firmly rooted predilection for spirits, made universal by the general practice of rural distilling in all grain-producing States as well as in those States in which the trade with the West Indies made molasses a common article of barter. In the entire country, excepting New York and Pennsylvania, the total production of malt liquors in 1809-10 amounted to barely forty-five thousand barrels, of which about twenty-three thousand barrels (31½ gallons) were brewed in Massachusetts, while New York and Pennsylvania produced 139,000 barrels. During the brief era of the first internal revenue system, with its Whiskey Revolution and other open violations of the law, brewing did indeed regain some of its lost ground, only to relapse again into its former somnolent condition, however, as soon as the “free-whiskey” policy was reintroduced. When, four decades after Hamilton’s régime, the temperance movement began to make itself felt in New England, the brewing industry, the very agency which all our great statesmen had sought to employ against the whiskey habit, had to atone for the sins of the rural distillers, to whose unlimited operations is due all the misery and degradation that lent a justifying aspect to the demands of the reformers. Under prohibitory rule in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and other eastern States, the general use of ardent spirits, manufactured outside of, but freely sold within the borders of these States, tended to confirm the rum habit, and this was all the more inevitable, because for reasons well known to every one familiar with the question, malt liquors cannot be sold surreptitiously without great expense and imminent risk of detection. This explains why before the introduction of the internal revenue system of 1861, which imparted a powerful impetus to brewing throughout the country, the industry lagged behind in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island and was never able to gain a permanent foothold in Maine.