to the quality of the liquors which are
mentioned in it. With regard to this question, my lords, there was no
possibility of long suspense; for the pernicious effects of spirits
were confessed equally by all those who countenanced and opposed this
new project; nor could any man take a survey of this city without
meeting in his way such objects as might make all farther inquiry
superfluous. The idleness, the insolence, the debauchery of the common
people, and their natural and certain consequences, poverty, diseases,
misery, and wickedness, are to be observed without any intention of
indulging such disagreeable speculations; in every part of this great
metropolis, whoever shall pass along the streets, will find wretches
stretched upon the pavement, insensible and motionless, and only
removed by the charity of passengers from the danger of being crushed
by carriages, or trampled by horses, or strangled with filth in the
common sewers; and others, less helpless perhaps, but more dangerous,
who have drank too much to fear punishment, but not enough to hinder
them from provoking it; who think themselves, in the elevation of
drunkenness, entitled to treat all those with contempt whom their
dress distinguishes from them, and to resent every injury which, in
the heat of their imagination, they suppose themselves to suffer, with
the utmost rage of resentment, violence of rudeness, and scurrility of
tongue.

No man can pass a single hour in publick places without meeting such
objects, or hearing such expressions as disgrace human nature; such as
cannot be looked upon without horrour, or heard without indignation,
and which there is, however, no possibility of removing or preventing,
whilst this hateful liquor is publickly sold. But the visible and
obvious effects of these pernicious draughts, however offensive or
inconvenient, are yet much less to be dreaded than their more slow and
secret operations. That excess of distilled spirits inflames the poor
to insolence and fury; that it exposes them either to hurt, by making
them insensible of danger, or to punishment, by making them fearless
of authority, is not to be reckoned the most fatal consequence of
their use; for these effects, though their frequency makes it
necessary to suppress them, with regard to each individual are of no
long duration; the understanding is in a short time recovered after a
single debauch, and the drunkard may return to his employment.

But though the