Nineteen Centuries of Drink in England: A HistoryFrench, Richard Valpy
History
Nineteen Centuries of Drink in England: A History
French, Richard Valpy
Drinking customs -- England; Drinking of alcoholic beverages -- Great Britain; England -- Social life and customs
The diffusion of sound information as to the extensive evils
produced to individuals and to the State, by the use of any
beverage that destroys the health, cripples the industry, and
poisons the morals of its victims.
The institution of every subordinate auxiliary means of promoting
the reformation of all such usages, courtesies, habits and customs
of the people, as lead to intemperate habits; more especially the
exclusion of ardent spirits from all places where large numbers
are congregated either for business or pleasure, and the changing
the current opinion of such spirits being wholesome and beneficial
(which the frequent practice of our offering them to those whom we
wish to please or reward so constantly fosters and prolongs) into
the opinion of their being a most pernicious evil, which should on
all occasions be avoided, as poisoner of the health, the morals,
and the peace of society.
The removal of all taxes on knowledge, and the extending every
facility to the widest spread of useful information to the humblest
classes of the community.
A national system of education, which should ensure the means of
instruction to all ranks and classes of the people, and which,
in addition to the various branches of requisite and appropriate
knowledge, should embrace, as an essential part of the instruction
given by it to every child in the kingdom, accurate information
as to the poisonous and invariably deleterious nature of ardent
spirits, as an article of diet, in any form or shape; and the
inculcation of a sense of shame at the crime of voluntarily
destroying, or thoughtlessly obscuring that faculty of reasoning,
and that consciousness of responsibility, which chiefly distinguish
man from the brute, and which his Almighty Maker, when He created
him in His own image, implanted in the human race to cultivate, to
improve, and to refine--and not to corrupt, to brutalise, and to
destroy.
_Ultimate or Prospective Remedies._
The ultimate or prospective remedies which have been strongly urged by
several witnesses, and which _they_ think, when public opinion shall be
sufficiently awakened to the great national importance of the subject,
may be safely recommended, include the following:--
(_a_) The absolute prohibition of the importation from any foreign
country, or from our colonies, of distilled spirits in any shape.
(_b_) The equally absolute prohibition of all distillation of
ardent spirits from grain.
(_c_) The restriction of distillation from other materials, to the
purposes of the arts, manufactures, and medicine, and the confining
the wholesale and retail dealing in such articles to chemists,
druggists, and dispensaries alone.
Finally they conclude:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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