sold to foreigners, will be privately landed
again upon our own coasts.

Thus, my lords, will the duty be collected, and afterwards repaid; and
the government will suffer the odium of imposing a severe tax, and
incur the expense of employing a great number of officers, without any
advantage to the publick. Spirits will, in many parts of the kingdom,
be very little dearer than at present, and drunkenness and debauchery
will still prevail.

That these arts, and a thousand others, will be practised by the
people to obtain this infatuating liquor, cannot be doubted. It cannot
be imagined that they will forbear frauds, who have had recourse to
violence, or that those will not endeavour to elude the government,
who have already defied it.

Every rigorous law will be either secretly evaded, or openly violated;
every severe restraint will be shaken off, either by artifice or vice;
nor can this vice, however dangerous or prevalent, be corrected but by
slow degrees, by straitening the reins of government imperceptibly,
and by superadding a second slight restraint, after the nation has
been for some time habituated to the first.

That the government proceeds by these easy and gentle methods of
reformation, ought not to be imputed to negligence, but necessity; for
so far has the government been from any connivance at this vice, that
an armed force was necessary to support the laws which were made to
restrain it, and secure the chief persons of the state from the
insults of the populace, whom they had only provoked by denying them
this pernicious liquor.

Since, therefore, my lords, all opposition to this predominant
inclination has appeared without effect, since the government
evidently wants power to conquer the united and incessant struggles
for the liberty of drunkenness, what remains but that this vice should
produce some advantage to the publick, in return for the innumerable
evils which arise from it, and that the government should snatch the
first opportunity of taxing that vice which cannot be reformed?

This duty arises, indeed, from a concurrence of different causes, of
just designs in the government, and of bad inclinations in the people.
The tax is just, and well meant; but it can be made sufficient to
support the expenses to which it is appropriated, only by the
resolution of the populace to continue, in some degree, their usual
luxury.

I am far, my lords, from thinking this method of raising money
eligible