lasses of society were as ignorant and brutal as the higher
were coarse and corrupt. Among the other qualities in which the times
were deficient, was philanthropy. The measures which the wisdom and
charity of the present have exerted to diminish crime, and to improve
the condition of the poor, were then represented only by a harsh and
cruel penal code, which had a powerful, though an indirect tendency to
promote pauperism and to multiply criminals. Although population had
greatly increased, no new provision had been made for religious
teaching, and there were no schools but those of Edward and
Elizabeth.[137] Defective poor-laws, which forbade laborers to move
from one parish to another in search of work, made pauperism in many
cases the inevitable fate of the industrious. In the cities there was
no adequate police regulation of the criminal classes; and this, too,
at a time when peaceful habits were fast growing among the people at
large, and police protection was more needed than ever before. At the
same time there came upon the lower classes, the terrible scourge of
gin. Violent and ignorant as these classes were, the effects upon them
of so cheap and maddening a drink were incalculably debasing. "The
drunkenness of the common people," says an eye-witness, "was so
universal by the retailing of a liquor called _gin_, with which they
could get drunk for a groat, that the whole town of London, and many
towns in the country swarmed with drunken people of both sexes from
morning to night, and were more like a scene from a Bacchanal than the
residence of a civil society."[138] The sign which hangs over the
inn-door in Hogarth's picture of Gin Lane, and announces that the
customer can get drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence, and have
straw for nothing, was a copy, not an invention. Attempts to limit the
traffic in gin were met by riots so fierce that the government was
obliged to withdraw its measures. The violent natures of the common
people appeared in their amusements as well as in their crimes. Their
sports were of the most brutal kind, and almost all involved the
sufferings of men or animals. Among other entertainments advertised to
take place in London in 1729 and 1730, were "a mad bull to be dressed
up with fireworks and turned loose in the game place, a dog to be
dressed up with fireworks over him, a bear to be let loose at the same
time, and a cat to be tied to the bull's tail, a mad bull dressed up
with fire