Ardent spirit is a great medicine, often to remove
distempers, much more frequently to prevent them, or to chase them away
in their beginnings. It is not nutritive in _any great_ degree. But if
not food, it greatly alleviates the want of it. It invigorates the
stomach for the digestion of poor, meagre diet, not easily alliable to
the human constitution. Wine the poor cannot touch. Beer, as applied to
many occasions, (as among seamen and fishermen, for instance,) will by
no means do the business. Let me add, what wits inspired with champagne
and claret will turn into ridicule,--it is a medicine for the mind.
Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, men
have at all times and in all countries called in some physical aid to
their moral consolations,--wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco.
I consider, therefore, the stopping of the distillery, economically,
financially, commercially, medicinally, and in some degree morally too,
as a measure rather well meant than well considered. It is too precious
a sacrifice to prejudice.
Gentlemen well know whether there be a scarcity of partridges, and
whether that be an effect of hoarding and combination. All the tame race
of birds live and die as the wild do.
As to the lesser articles, they are like the greater. They have followed
the fortune of the season. Why are fowls dear? Was not this the farmer's
or jobber's fault? I sold from my yard to a jobber six young and lean
fowls for four-and-twenty shillings,--fowls for which two years ago the
same man would not have given a shilling apiece.
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