It was not until 1689, when the Government abolished all restrictions upon gin-distilling, that hard liquor became plentiful in England, and then it became plentiful with a vengeance; the proletarianizing process had been going on for over a hundred years. To complete the sequence of Protestantism, proletarianism and hard liquor, came the doctrine of the inherent sinfulness of drink. This seems to have been first preached by the eighteenth century Methodists, who appear as a distinct schism from the Church of England in 1740. Thirty years later their teaching was familiar enough to be noticed in the theatre. In a drinking song in the first act of Goldsmith’s “She Stoops to Conquer,” first played in 1773, we find the following lines:— “When methodist preachers come down, A-preaching that drinking is sinful, I’ll wager the rascals a crown They always preach best with a skinful....” By the middle of the nineteenth century the other sectarian bodies, the Presbyterians, the Independents or Congregationalists, and the Baptists, had followed the Methodists in adopting the Mohammedan fanaticism of total abstinence. The final step of all, that of attempting to compel everyone to be teetotal by means of Prohibition laws, was taken not in England where total abstinence was first preached in the name of religion, but in America. In England the sectarian “Nonconformist” has always been in the minority and after the brief seventeenth century Puritan supremacy the nation turned fiercely against them. In America, on the other hand, they were in a majority from the first. Virginia was settled by Anglicans and Maryland by Roman Catholics, but the other English colonies were Puritan almost to a man. The colony of Massachusetts Bay was an absolute Congregationalist theocracy from its foundation in 1629 for over half a century. In England, during the short Puritan ascendancy there (1649-60), the sectaries had used the full power of the State to suppress popular festivals and the decorative side of life. It was forbidden to keep Christmas or Easter. At the other end of the scale, it was forbidden to bait bears, “not because the sport gave pain to the bear but because it gave pleasure to the spectators,” as Macaulay has it in a famous phrase. In one of their culminating atrocities, the closing of the theatres, the Puritans displayed their characteristic hypocrisy. Instead of frankly avowing that theatrical performances offended their peculiar religion they gave as reasons for closing them the _plague and the Civil War_. But when plague and the Civil War had ceased, did they permit the theatres to reopen? By no means. Dancing and card playing they held to be cardinal sins. Their garments must be sad-coloured, although in this respect but little worse than men’s clothes to-day. Their “meeting houses,” which they substituted for churches, were purposely made as bare as barns.