n. Wine the poor cannot touch. Beer, as applied to
many occasions, (as among seamen and fishermen, for instance,) will by
no means do the business. Let me add, what wits inspired with champagne
and claret will turn into ridicule,--it is a medicine for the mind.
Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, men
have at all times and in all countries called in some physical aid to
their moral consolations,--wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco.

I consider, therefore, the stopping of the distillery, economically,
financially, commercially, medicinally, and in some degree morally too,
as a measure rather well meant than well considered. It is too precious
a sacrifice to prejudice.

Gentlemen well know whether there be a scarcity of partridges, and
whether that be an effect of hoarding and combination. All the tame race
of birds live and die as the wild do.

As to the lesser articles, they are like the greater. They have followed
the fortune of the season. Why are fowls dear? Was not this the farmer's
or jobber's fault? I sold from my yard to a jobber six young and lean
fowls for four-and-twenty shillings,--fowls for which two years ago the
same man would not have given a shilling apiece. He sold them afterwards
at Uxbridge, and they were taken to London to receive the last hand.

As to the operation of the war in causing the scarcity of provisions, I
understand that Mr. Pitt has given a particular answer to it; but I do
not think it worth powder and shot.

I do not wonder the papers are so full of this sort of matter, but I am
a little surprised it should be mentioned in Parliament. Like all great
state questions, peace and war may be discussed, and different opinions
fairly formed, on political grounds; but on a question of the present
price of provisions, when peace with the Regicides is always uppermost,
I can only say that great is the love of it.

After all, have we not reason to be thankful to the Giver of all Good?
In our history, and when "the laborer of England is said to have been
once happy," we find constantly, after certain intervals, a period of
real famine, by which a melancholy havoc was made among the human race.
The price of provisions fluctuated dreadfully, demonstrating a
deficiency very different from the worst failures of the present moment.
Never, since I have known England, have I known more than a comparative
scarcity. The price of wheat, taking a number of years togeth