on commodities, and adjudged not by
the common judges of property, but by wretches hired by those to whom
excise is paid." In 1659, when the town of Edinburgh placed an
additional impost on ale, the Convenanter Nicoll proclaimed it an act so
impious that immediately "God frae the heavens declared his anger by
sending thunder and unheard tempests and storms." And we still recall
Burns' fiery invective:

Thae curst horse-leeches o' the Excise
Wha mak the whisky stills their prize!
Haud up thy han', Deil! ance, twice, thrice!
There, seize the blinkers! [wretches]
An bake them up in brunstane pies
For poor d--n'd drinkers.

Perhaps the chief reason, in England, for this outspoken detestation of
the exciseman lay in the fact that the law empowered him to enter
private houses and to search at his own discretion. In Scotland and
Ireland there was another objection, even more valid in the eyes of the
common people; excise struck heaviest at their national drink.
Englishmen, at the time of which we are speaking, were content with
their ale, not yet having contracted the habit of drinking gin; but
Scotchmen and Irishmen preferred distilled spirits, manufactured, as a
rule, out of their own barley, in small pot-stills (_poteen_ means,
literally, a little pot), the process being a common household art
frequently practiced "every man for himself and his neighbor." A tax,
then, upon whiskey was as odious as a tax upon bread baked on the
domestic hearth--if not, indeed, more so.

Now, there came a time when the taxes laid upon spirituous liquors had
increased almost to the point of prohibition. This was done, not so much
for the sake of revenue, as for the sake of the public health and
morals. Englishmen had suddenly taken to drinking gin, and the immediate
effect was similar to that of introducing firewater among a race of
savages. There was hue and cry (apparently with good reason), that the
gin habit, spreading like a plague, among a people unused to strong
liquors, would soon exterminate the English race. Parliament, alarmed at
the outlook, then passed an excise law of extreme severity. As always
happens in such cases, the law promptly defeated its own purpose by
breeding a spirit of defiance and resistance among the great body of the
people.

The heavier the tax, the more widespread became the custom of illicit
distilling. The law was evaded in two different ways, the method
depending somewhat upo