It was stated by Mr. Dewar last year (1898) that there were 89,000,000 gallons of whisky lying idle in bond because sufficient suitable water to dilute it to the orthodox strength could not be found. This statement is calculated to give a moderate drinker the gapes; whilst Sir Wilfrid Lawson and others must have longed for permission to set fire to every bonded warehouse in the Kingdom. But the same great authority {78} on the wines of bonnie Scotland made another statement at the same time which is eminently calculated to remove all fears lest whisky, like brandy, be on the down line. “The serpent Alcohol,” remarks a writer in the _Daily Telegraph_, in discussing Mr. Dewar’s speech, “may have been scotched”—was this meant for a joke?—“but it is far from having been killed.” According to the Ex-Sheriff’s statistics the distillation of Irish whisky, despite its diminishing popularity, has increased during the last fourteen years by about thirty per cent; while in Scotland during the same period the increase has been at the rate of nearly eighty per cent. Ireland, that is to say, which produced eleven million gallons in 1884, now produces fourteen million and a half gallons; while the Scotch output, which was eighteen million gallons in the former year, had risen in 1898 to the enormous figure of thirty-three millions and a half. Hech sirs! these be braw figures indeed. Yet let not the British be held up to reprobation as hard drinkers, as long as France is a going concern. Statistics prove that in Scotland, the land o’ the barley bree, the consumption of spirits during the year 1892–93 averaged a little more than twelve and a half pints per month, which is little more than the proportion of spirits required by the Parisians, without wine, absinthe, and—other things. The boulevardiers are called “temperate,” although they drink as much spirits as do the Scots, and thirty times as much wine, not to mention cider and beer. Distilling in Britain dates from the eleventh {79} century, but in the beginning it was worked solely in the monasteries by the jovial monks. What a good time those monks of old would seem to have had! According to the popular prints they were usually engaged either in fishing, eating oysters, drinking out of flagons, catching beetles, confessing pretty women, or being shaved; and we know that their abiding-places were built, for the most part, on the banks of a river which absolutely swarmed with salmon or trout, in the midst of a district teeming with game. Any how the monks made spirits, or “strong waters” as they were called in those days, first.