hers liked so well, and deemed the
great essence of hospitality, are no longer heard of? The three-bottle
man now could no more be found than the Plesiosaurus. He belongs to a
past totally and essentially irrevocable.

And by what has this happy change been effected? Surely not by
withdrawing temptation. Not only have we an infinitely wider choice in
fluids than our forefathers, but they are served and ministered with
appliances far more tasteful and seductive. It is, however, to the
higher tone of society the revolution is owing. Men saw that drunkenness
was disgraceful: it rendered society disorderly and riotous; it
interfered with all real conversational pleasure; it led to unmannerly
excesses, and to quarrels. A higher cultivation repudiated all these
things; and even they who, so to say, "liked their wine" too well, were
slow to disparage themselves by an indulgence which good taste declared
to be ungentlemanlike.

Is it completely impossible to introduce some such sentiment as this
into other orders of society? We see it certainly in some foreign
countries--why not in our own? Radical orators are incessantly telling
us of the mental powers and the intellectual cultivation of the
working-classes, and I am well-disposed to believe there is much truth
in what they say. Why not then adapt, to men so highly civilised, some
of those sentiments that sway the classes more favoured of fortune? The
French artisan would deem it a disgrace to be drunk--so the Italian;
even the German would only go as far as a sort of beery bemuddlement
that made him a more ideal representative of the Vaterland: why must the
Englishman, of necessity, be the inferior in civilisation to these? I am
not willing to believe the task of such a reformation hopeless, though I
am perfectly convinced that no greater folly could be committed than to
attempt it by an Act of Parliament.

When legislation has led men to be agreeable in society, unassuming in
manners, and gentle in deportment, it may make them temperate in their
liquor, but not before. The thing cannot be done in committee, nor by
a vote of the House. It is only to be accomplished by the filtering
process, by which the good habits of a nation drop down and permeate the
strata beneath; so that, in course of time, the whole mass, leavened
by the same ingredients, becomes one as completely in sentiment as in
interest. "Four-fifths of the ratepayers" will not effect this. After
all, Mr Lawson