Mr. Crosland has very kindly suggested that "under the inspiring tutelage of the national bard Scotland has become one of the drunkenest nations in the world." I shall not retaliate as one might do, but shall content myself by referring the reader to the easily accessible tables of statistics, which render it quite plain that Scotland\'s drunkenness is very considerably exceeded by the drunkenness of England.

In London, at any rate, strong drink flows like a river. There are 5300 licensed houses in the metropolitan area alone. In Kilburn, a suburb of more or less irreproachable respectability, there are twenty-five churches and chapels and thirty-five public-houses.[Pg 145] During late years public-house property has begun to be looked upon in the light of a gilt-edged investment. Turn where one will, one finds the older inns are being swept away, while on their sites are erected flaring gin-palaces, with plate-glass fronts, elaborate mahogany fitments, gorgeous saloon and private bars, painted ceilings, inlaid floors, and electric light throughout. Behind the bar, instead of mine host of a former day and his wife and daughter, there are half a dozen perked-up barmaids with rouged cheeks and Rossetti hair, and a person called the manager, who for ￡2 a week runs the place for its proprietors—a Limited Company, which owns, perhaps, twenty or thirty other houses. In the conduct of these mammoth drinking-places three great points are kept in view: namely, that a quick-drinking, stand-up trade pays better than any amount of slow regular custom; that the English drinker of the lower class cannot tell the difference between good drink and bad, often preferring, indeed, the bad to the good;[Pg 146] and that, as bad liquor is cheaper than good, the sound commercial thing to do is to supply bad liquor.

With these admirable axioms continually before it, the English trade has prospered amazingly. More drink and worse drink is sold in England to-day than has ever been sold in England before. Through legislation intended to ensure sound liquor and the proper conduct of licensed houses the proprietors have consistently made a point of driving the usual brewer\'s dray. "In order to meet the Food and Drugs Adulteration Act, all spirits sold at this establishment, while of the same excellent quality as heretofore, are diluted according to strength." "The same excellent quality as heretofore" is choice, and so is "diluted according to strength." As for the beer, we dilute also the beer according to strength. When we are caught at it, it is a mistake on the part of the cellarman, who has been discharged; and the fine is so small in proportion to the profit on selling water, that we smile at the back of[Pg 147] our necks and keep on diluting according to strength. Our whole system, in fact, is designed to make people drink, and to make them drink the worst that we dare put before them.

Now, the Scot, drunkard or no drunkard, does have something of a taste in liquor. The best clarets have gone to Scotland (in spite of Mr. Crosland) since claret became a dinner wine. You cannot put off a Scot with either bad whisky or bad beer. He knows what whisky should be and what beer should be, and in Scotland, at any rate, he never has any difficulty in getting them. But the English, taking them in the mass, are quite the other way. Any sort of wine, provided it be properly fortified and sophisticated, passes with them for the real thing. Their Scotch whisky is about the most wholesome thing they drink; but large quantities of this are bought by English merchants in a crude state, and rammed down the public throat without a thought to maturing, blending, and otherwise rendering the spirit[Pg 148] potable. English beer, we have been told in song and story, is the finest beer in the world. Yet nobody can visit an English brewery without discovering that English beer is not English beer at all. Glucose in the place of malt, quassia and gentian in the place of hops, finings in the place of storage, are the universal order; and so depraved and perverted has the fine old English taste in beer become that brewers who have set up to provide an honest article and sent it out to their customers have had it returned with the curt comment that "nobody would drink such hog-wash, and what the customers want............