The Constitution clearly stated the power of Congress to lay and collect both imposts and excises. From the beginning of his reports upon available sources of revenue, Hamilton had suggested a special impost upon imported liquors and an excise upon those manufactured in the United States. He fully realised that the word "excise" was obnoxious to citizens who had migrated from Scotland and Ireland, where the tax was imposed by a superior force, and in England as well, where it had been known since Cromwell's day. To these people it meant not only a tax on liquors, but on candles, salt, vinegar, and other forms of domestic manufacture. It meant a license to own a gun, and to peddle small wares. Not many years had passed since Samuel Johnson in his dictionary had defined it as "a hateful tax levied upon commodities and adjudged not by the common judges of property but wretches hired by those to whom it is paid." Added to these inherited prejudices of the Irish and Scotch-Irish settlers in western Pennsylvania against the excise was a local complaint that they lacked roads for transporting their grain across the mountains to market and were prohibited from floating it down to New Orleans both by the distance and by the hostility of the Spanish. Their surplus produce must rot unless it could be manufactured into spirits which could be consumed at home or carried to a market. A horse, it was said, could carry only four bushels of grain across the mountains; but he could take twenty-four bushels when converted into liquor. In that day, before the later temperance movements had created a different sentiment, whiskey was regarded as a necessary article of food as much as beef or bread. The amount of strong liquor used in the United States was estimated at two and one-half gallons per year for every man, woman, and child.