r other beverages,--the
national abstemiousness in regard to food, and the addictedness to beer
for thousands of years past,--and we have a somewhat rational
explanation of the springing-up and development into such monstrous
proportions of the manufacture and consumption of this article. Of the
many it may be said,--

"They drink their simple beverage with a gust,
And feast upon an onion and a crust."

Bavaria, not including the Rhenish Palatinate, uses over six million
bushels of barley, and upwards of seven million pounds of hops,
annually, in its breweries, making over eight million eimers, that is,
about five million barrels of beer. But nearly half the kingdom is
wine-growing, and uses comparatively little beer; so that this is mainly
consumed in the other half, that is, by about three millions of people.
At an average price of three and a half cents per quart, there is
consumed in the kingdom fifty million florins, or over twenty million
dollars, annually, in this beverage. Both manufacture and consumption
have their head-quarters in Munich. The quantity manufactured in this
city alone in 1856-7 was nine hundred and fifty thousand eimers, or
about five hundred and seventy thousand barrels, being nearly five
barrels a head for the whole population, men, women, and children.
Allowing for the amount exported, or sent out of the city, there remains
something like four barrels to each person. This is one quart, or four
of our common table-glasses, per day. But some drink none, others
little; a man is scarcely reckoned with real beer-drinkers until he
drinks six masses,--twenty-four of our common tumblers; ten masses are
not uncommon; twenty to thirty masses--eighty to one hundred and twenty
of our dinner-glasses--are drunk by some, and on a wager even much more.
The sick man whose physician prescribed for him a quart of herb-tea as
the only thing that would save him, and who replied that he was gone,
then, for he held but a _pint_, was no Bavarian; for the most modest
Bavarian girl would not feel alarmed in regard to her capacity, if
ordered to drink a gallon,--certainly not, if the liquid were beer.

The aggregate labor performed in this branch of popular industry is thus
seen at a glance. But how is this done, and by whom? What is the noise
or noiselessness with which such torrents of this foaming liquid rush
daily through the channels of human bodies made originally too small to
admit half the quantity? What