354 DRUNKENNESS. 



and prostitution in the young, to burnings, robberies, and more hardened 

 offences in the old ; by which the jails and prisons, the hulks and convict 

 transports, are filled with inmates, and an enormous mass of human beings, 

 who, under sober habits and moral training, would be sources of wealth 

 and strength to the country, are transformed, chiefly through the remote or 

 immediate influence of intoxicating drinks, into excrescences of corruption 

 and weakness, which must be cut off and cast away from the community 

 to prevent the gangrenous contamination of its whole frame, leaving the 

 body itself in a constant state of that inflammatory excitement which al- 

 ways produces exhaustion and weakness in the end, and thus causing the 

 country to sacrifice every year a larger portion of blood and treasure than 

 the most destructive wars occasion ; the innocent population thus made 

 criminal, being, like the gram subjected to distillation, converted from a 

 wholesome source of strength and prosperity into a poisoned issue of weak- 

 ness and decay. 



"19. The retardation of all improvement, inventive or industrial, civil 

 or political, moral or religious, the hindering of education, the weakening 

 of good example, and the creation of constant and increasing difficulties in 

 the propagation of the sound morality and sublime truths of the gospel, 

 both at home and abroad, according to the testimony of teachers, pastors, 

 and others, examined by your committee ; the sum expended in intoxicating 

 drinks in the city of Glasgow alone, being stated, by one of the witnesses 

 from that neighbourhood, to be nearly equal to the whole amount ex- 

 pended on public institutions of charity and benevolence in the entire United 

 Kingdom. 



" 20. That the mere pecuniary loss to the nation from these several 

 causes already enumerated, namely, the destruction of an immense amount 

 of grain subjected to distillation, the abstraction of productive labour from 

 the community, the properly destroyed by sea and l**id, the diminished 

 efficiency of the navy and army, the disease and deterioration of the physi- 

 cal and mental powers of the population, the increase of pauperism, the 

 spread of crime, and the retardation of improvement, caused by the exces- 

 sive use of intoxicating drinks, may be fairly estimated at little short of 

 fifty millions sterling per annum." 



Mr. Buckingham, with oriental magnificence of fancy, appears to 

 have addressed the witnesses summoned to give their evidence, in 

 the words of Pope 



" Give all thou canst and let me dream the rest ;" 



and being, we suspect, something of an old woman, he puts faith in 

 his own dreams. Like Goethe's Faust, a little black dog arrests Mr. 

 Buckingham's attention he invites it to enter his study and there 

 it increases, in an incredibly short space of time, into an enormous 

 quadruped. " Look ye here," says he, as he takes the chair of the 

 select committee, " I have seen a terrible monster lately. " What 

 manner of monster may it have been ?" quoth a quidnunc, " a deli- 

 cate monster ?" " By no means," cries the chairman; <e let me call in 

 my witnesses." They are forthwith summoned, and severally depose 

 one, to having seen the head of this beast, another, to having 

 caught a glimpse of his hinder parts ; one thinks it was very much 

 like a camel another, " very like a whale." " Let us endeavour, 

 'briefly and faintly to describe him,'" say the select committee. 

 They do so. Having faintly shadowed forth this Dragon of Wantley, 

 the select committee, startled at the thing themselves have made, 



