THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY. 645 



Condiments were used to stimulate drinking ; glasses were so shaped 

 that they would not stand, hut must he held till emptied ; and a man's 

 worth was in part measured hy the numher of hottles 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 

 thorouo-hcroinfr in their views and more energetic in their actions, 

 which have heen 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 agita- 

 tions 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 them- 

 selves 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 drunk- 

 enness 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 learn- 

 ing as referred to Theology, a positive discouragement of all other 

 learning ; ' 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 



1 Hallam's " Middle Ages," chap, ix., part ii. 



