Now, the Scot, drunkard or no drunkard, does have something of a taste in liquor. The best clarets have gone to Scotland (in spite of Mr. Crosland) since claret became a dinner wine. You cannot put off a Scot with either bad whisky or bad beer. He knows what whisky should be and what beer should be, and in Scotland, at any rate, he never has any difficulty in getting them. But the English, taking them in the mass, are quite the other way. Any sort of wine, provided it be properly fortified and sophisticated, passes with them for the real thing. Their Scotch whisky is about the most wholesome thing they drink; but large quantities of this are bought by English merchants in a crude state, and rammed down the public throat without a thought to maturing, blending, and otherwise rendering the spirit potable. English beer, we have been told in song and story, is the finest beer in the world. Yet nobody can visit an English brewery without discovering that English beer is not English beer at all. Glucose in the place of malt, quassia and gentian in the place of hops, finings in the place of storage, are the universal order; and so depraved and perverted has the fine old English taste in beer become that brewers who have set up to provide an honest article and sent it out to their customers have had it returned with the curt comment that "nobody would drink such hog-wash, and what the customers wanted was beer, and not brewer's apron." Every now and again scares crop up in consequence of the use of improper ingredients; there is an inquiry, a Royal Commission, and the Englishman still goes on stolidly drinking. Arsenic will not drive him away from his favourite tipple, neither will _cocculus indicus_ or any of the round dozen abominations upon which the brewer's chemist takes his stand.