The quantity of ‘vitriol madness’ which unprincipled dealers push into the market, and which is sold cheaply to the unscrupulous proprietors of garish dram-shops to be disposed of dearly enough to deluded customers, is at once great and glaring. I wonder the Temperance party do not use their earnestness in the cause of reforming the drink, so that when the poor man wants whiskey he gets it, and not turpentine and fusel-oil and amylic atrocities; or when the doctor orders the sick woman port wine she is not imposed upon by a fraudulent decoction of logwood. Our ancestors, wiser in their generation, appointed ‘ale-tasters,’ who did their duty without fear or favour. Why cannot ‘spirit-tasters’ be introduced in our day? Or, why cannot whiskey come within the limits of the Food Adulteration Act? The quantity of bad whiskey made in Great Britain is amazing. To use the word ‘whiskey’ is an outrage of the term. ‘Patent spirit’ is the Excise description for this fluid, which is made by a special apparatus, known as the Coffey Patent Still, from maize, rice, damaged barley, &c. Malting would be too costly, so this material is converted into starch and saccharine by a process of vitriol. It is then passed through the Coffey Still by only one process, and boiled by steam instead of fire. The patent spirit is ostensibly sold for blending purposes, and for cheapening finer spirit. Some of these cheap whiskies are as combustible as that Bourbon spirit of which a man once partook, and found so inflammable that--blowing his nose directly afterwards--he found his pocket-handkerchief in flames. Such whiskey, they say in the States, kills dead at ten paces, and no human being drinking it ever lives to pay his debts. Still, intemperance, like a myriad-headed monster, rears its hideous head, and the usual thirty millions sterling in the shape of taxation rolls into the lap of the reluctant Chancellor of the Exchequer. _Reluctant_, for so they would have us understand their attitude towards their gains from a nation’s indulgence. A comparatively recent Chancellor, Sir Stafford Northcote, in his budget speech, 1874, remarked:-- If the reduction of the revenue derived from spirits be due to other causes; if it should be due to a material and considerable change in the habits of the people, and increasing habits of temperance and abstinence from the use of ardent spirits, I venture to say that the amount of wealth such a change would bring to the nation would utterly throw into the shade the amount of revenue that is now derived from the spirit duty. Nearly a century ago, Sir Frederic Eden, in his _State of the Poor_, observed:--