compared to one Irishman; whiskey is the ordinary spirituous drink of Irishmen. Now, the taxes on beer and on whiskey are the same in Great Britain and Ireland; but the tax on beer, measured by the alcoholic standard, is about six times lower than the tax on whiskey;[170] beer, therefore, compared with whiskey is greatly undertaxed; whiskey compared with beer is greatly overtaxed; the ordinary drink of Englishmen is treated differently from the ordinary drink of Irishmen, one being encouraged, the other discouraged; though the taxes on each commodity may be everywhere the same, the equality of taxation manifestly results in wrong. The difference amounts to a very large sum; it is one of the causes that Ireland is overtaxed.[171] Equality of taxation may, therefore, be not equity; it may, as I have said, be sheer iniquity; and this is emphatically the case with respect to Ireland. This system is productive of gross injustice as regards what may be deemed the popular Irish drink; but arguments to support it have not been wanting; they have been complacently gulped down at several public meetings, it is unnecessary to add within the borders of England. The 'mere Irish,' it is said, have shocking bad tastes; let them take beer instead of whiskey and they can have no grievance; besides, whiskey is a nasty and unwholesome thing; it is in mercy to them that it is excessively taxed. Is it possible that people who utter this stuff do not see that sumptuary legislation of extreme harshness, nay, persecution of the worst kind, may be justified on the same class of premises? Suppose that Napoleon, in the plenitude of his power, had declared that the Parisians did not know what was good for them, and had heavily taxed their coffee to make them drink tea, even Austerlitz would not have saved the Empire. Marie Antoinette actually made an attempt to banish from her Court the velvets and silks of Lyons, and to make it adopt the cambrics and muslins of Belgium; she would have been too glad to see the first taxed and the second duty free, for she thought the French taste for heavy and gorgeous apparel bad; she only aroused the indignation of Versailles. Or say that the priests of the Jove of the Capitol had argued in this way: 'Really these detestable Christians are fools for worshipping a crucified Jew; they have only to bow down to Caesar to escape the lions; otherwise they have themselves alone to blame.' Nay, coming nearer home, might not a holy prelate of the Irish Established Church in the eighteenth century have reconciled the penal code to his conscience, by whispering to himself that the deluded Papists had but to give up their vain superstitions, and to conform to the pure well of faith that had its source in the Castle, and that then they would be no longer outlaws; but let them take the consequences if they were blind to their best interests on earth and in heaven. In fact, any act of despotism on the part of the State might be