If the change we now witness is going to be permanent, that is, if the crusade on behalf of abstinence from strong drink is to proceed with redoubled success next year, Mr. Childers will not only he unable to make any allowance for an elastic growth of the excise receipts, but he will have to prepare for a diminution. Had the coming event cast its shadow before? Isaac Disraeli long ago predicted a _return_ to sobriety. We shall probably (said he) outlive that custom of hard drinking, which was so long one of our national vices. Everyone devoutly longs for such a _terminus ad quem_. But _were_ the former days really better than these? Could we devoutly desire a _return_ to any social era of the past? A pre-Elizabethan dietetic millennium is a retrospective mirage. It was a phantom of the historian Camden, which the elder Disraeli, and others in his wake, have endeavoured to stereotype. Granted, that nations, like individuals, are imitators; granted, that the English in their long wars in the Netherlands learnt to drown themselves in immoderate drinking, and by drinking others’ healths to impair their own; still it is _not_ true that in those wars they ‘first’ learnt such excess, and it is _not_ true that ‘of all the northern nations, they had been before this most commended for their sobriety.’ For at least one thousand years before the Netherland wars, Britain had been stigmatised for intemperance. Gildas had called attention in the sixth century to the fact that laity and clergy slumbered away their time in drunkenness. S. Boniface (a native of Britain) in the eighth century had written to Cuthbert respecting the vice of drunkenness: ‘This is an evil peculiar to pagans and _our_ race. Neither the Franks, nor the Gauls, nor the Lombards, nor the Romans, nor the Greeks, commit it.’ We have already noticed that the conquest of the English by the Normans has been attributed especially to the then prevailing habit of intemperance: that in the following century John of Salisbury could write: ‘Habits of drinking have made the English famous among all foreign nations.’ How then could the Elizabethan town-wit, Tom Nash, write: ‘Superfluity in drink 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 that highest degree of hatred that might be’?[253] No. It is a long story; and three centuries do not compass it. But a better tone is beginning to prevail, which augurs well for a time when abuse being buried in the hansard dust of oblivion, man may not hesitate to use the gifts which a gracious Father has given His children to enjoy. FOOTNOTES: [206] _England in the Eighteenth Century_, i. 479. [207] See Pratt: _Flowering Plants_, vol. v. Also, Larwood: _History of Signboards_. [208] John Byrom’s _Journal_, published by the Chetham Society.