changing nation. But the use of either beer or wine at the
tables of the Philadelphians, when I first lived among them, was
quite exceptional. There was a small knot of old-fashioned
gentlemen (very like old-fashioned Englishmen they were), by
whom good wine was known and appreciated; especially certain
exquisite Madeira, of the Bingham and Butler names, the like of
which it was believed the world could not produce; but this was
Olympian nectar, for the gods alone; and the usual custom of the
best society, at the early three-o'clock dinner, was
water-drinking. Nor had the immense increase of the German
population then flooded Philadelphia with perennial streams from
innumerable "lager beer" cellars and saloons: the universal
rule, at the time when these letters were written, was absolute
temperance; the exception to it, a rare occasional instance of
absolute intemperance.

Very many fewer than fifty years ago, a celebrated professional
English cricketer consulted, in deep dudgeon, a medical
gentleman upon certain internal symptoms, which he attributed
entirely to the "damned beastly cold water" which had been the
sole refreshment in the Philadelphia cricket-field, and which
had certainly heated his temper to a pitch of exasperation which
made it difficult for the medical authority appealed to, to keep
his countenance during the consultation.

I need not say that, under the above state of things, no
provision was made for what I should call domestic or household
drunkenness in American families. Beer, or beer money, was not
found necessary to sustain the strength of footmen driving about
town on a coach-box for an hour or two of an afternoon, or
valets laying out their masters' boots and cravats for dinner,
or ladies'-maids pinning caps on their mistresses' heads, or
even young housemaids condemned to the exhausting labor of
making beds and dusting furniture. The deplorable practice of
_swilling_ adulterated malt liquor two or three times a day,
begun in early boy and girlhood among English servants, had not
in America, as I am convinced it has with us, laid the
foundation for later habits of drinking in a whole class of the
community,