are the final results upon body, mind, and
heart of the present and future of the race? Does government encourage,
stimulate, control, and turn to account this national appetite? These
questions invite, and will well repay, a few moments' attention.

I once heard a college student announce as the text of his oration
Lindley Murray's well-known definition of the verb,--a word which
signifies "to be, to do, or to suffer"; and he followed up his
announcement by a most beautiful and conclusive argument to show that
this definition describes with equal accuracy three classes of men into
which the whole world may be divided: a class who have no purpose in
life but simply "to be"; an active class, whose mission is "to do," to
which they bend all their energies; and a passive class, who merely
"suffer" themselves to be employed as the tools of the men of action.
Whether he would have modified his statement, had he known something of
Bavarian beer-drinkers, I do not know; for, although these belong,
doubtless, in general, to the class of men which he designated as having
no purpose but simply "to be," yet they certainly have a decided
preference as to the means of their being, which must be beer; they have
activity enough to get where this can be obtained, and to handle the
needed quantity; and the man who holds and bears about fifteen or twenty
quarts a day must have no small share of the grace of passive endurance.

There is a class of the nobility too poor to treat themselves with the
diversions of court-life, and with notions of noble birth which forbid
them to engage in business, especially as they would thereby forfeit
their rank. They fund their small means, so as to yield them a stated
income; and in spending this and their time, they fall into a round
which brings them three or four times a day to some place where beer is
to be found, and with it a billiard-table and a reading-room. This class
does not, perhaps, embrace a very large number of the nobility, but it
is largely reinforced from others, whose small means are similarly
invested, and whose whole time is on their hands for disposal. The class
of men engaged in business, and pursuing it somewhat actively, give less
attention to beer during the day. They take a couple of glasses--four of
our common tumblers--at dinner, and perhaps send out a servant
occasionally during the day to replenish a pitcher for the
counter,--not, however, to treat customers, as used to b