Drunkenness was another terrible vice, even then more rampant and wildly excessive than in later years. While the aristocracy drank deep of Burgundy and port, and every roaring blade disdained all heel-taps, the masses fuddled and besotted themselves with gin. This last-named pernicious fluid was as cheap as dirt. A gin-shop actually had on its sign the notice, “Drunk for 1_d._; dead drunk for 2_d._; clean straw for nothing,” which Hogarth introduced into his caricature of Gin Lane. No pencil could paint, no pen describe the scenes of hideous debauchery hourly enacted in the dens and purlieus of the town. Legislation was powerless to restrain the popular craving. The Gin Act, passed in 1736 amidst the execrations of the mob, which sought to vent its rage upon Sir Joseph Jekyll, the chief promoter of the Bill, was generally evaded. The much-loved poisonous spirit was still retailed under fictitious names, such as Sangree, Tow Row, the Makeshift, and King Theodore of Corsica. It was prescribed as a medicine for cholic to be taken two or three times a day. Numberless tumults arose out of the prohibition to retail spirituous liquors, and so openly was the law defied, that twelve thousand persons were convicted within two years of having sold them illegally in London. Informers were promptly bought off or intimidated, magistrates “through fear or corruption” would not convict, and the Act was repealed in the hope that more moderate duty and stricter enforcement of the law would benefit the revenue and yet lessen consumption. The first was undoubtedly affected, but hardly the latter. Fielding, writing nearly ten years after the repeal of the Act, says that he has reason to believe that “gin is the principal sustenance (if it may be so called) of more than a hundred thousand people in the metropolis,” and he attributed to it most of the crimes committed by the wretches with whom he had to deal. “The intoxicating draught itself disqualifies them from any honest means to acquire it, at the same time that it removes sense of fear and shame, and emboldens them to commit every wicked and desperate enterprise.”