Condiments were used to stimulate drinking; glasses were so shaped that they would not stand, but must he held till emptied; and a man's worth was in part measured by the number of bottles he could take in. After a reaction had already greatly diminished the evil among the upper and middle ranks, there came an open recognition of the evil; resulting in Temperance Societies, which did their share toward further diminishing it. Then came the Teetotal Societies, more thoroughgoing in their views and more energetic in their actions, which have been making the evil still less; the accumulated effect of these causes "being, that for a long time past among the upper classes, the drinking which was once creditable has become a disgrace; while among the lower classes it has greatly decreased, and come to he generally reprobated. Those, however, who, carrying on the agitations against it, have had their eyes more and more widely opened to the vice, assert or imply in their speeches and petitions that the vice is not only great but growing. Having in the course of a generation much mitigated it by their voluntary efforts, they now make themselves believe, and make others believe, that it is too gigantic to be dealt with otherwise than by repressive enactments—Maine Laws and Permissive-Prohibitory Bills. And, if we are to be guided by a Select Committee which has just reported, fines and imprisonments for drunkenness must be made far more severe than now, and reformatories must be established in which inebriates shall be dealt with much as criminals are dealt with.
Take, again, the case of education. Go back far enough, and you find nobles not only incapable of reading and writing, but treating these accomplishments with contempt. Go back not quite so far, and you find, along with a slight encouragement by authority of such learning as referred to Theology, a positive discouragement of all other learning;[1] joined with the belief that only for the clergy is learning of any kind proper. Go back a much smaller distance, and you find in the highest classes inability to spell tolerably, joined with more or less of the feeling that good spelling was a pedantry improper for ladies—a feeling akin to that named by Shakespeare as shown by those who counted it "a meanness to write fair." Down even to quite modern times, well-to-do farmers and others of their rank were by no means all of them able to read and write. Education, spreading thus slowly during so many centuries, has during the last century spread with comparative rapidity. Since Raikes commenced Sunday-schools in 1771; since Lancaster, the Quaker, in 1796 set up the first of the schools that afterward went by his name; since 1811, when the Church had to cease its opposition and become a competitor in educating poor children; the strides have been enormous: a degree of ignorance which had continued the ride during so many centuries was made in the course of half a century the exception. And then in 1834, after
- ↑ Hallam's "Middle Ages," chap, ix., part ii.
