quartern of gin, while wife and children are waiting for him in the cart below, Crabbe speaks of the "riots of the Green, that sprang at first from yonder noisy Inn," and he indicates, in a strong touch, how furiously brutal the heavy drinking often made the churl. Fruitful source of most wretched poverty and dastardly crime, its profit has been too great for the brewer, the maltster, the innkeeper, and all the money-makers of the country-side, for a middle-class Parliament to do other than give its control to the country magistrates, men, who if not brewers, maltsters, and distillers themselves, have lived in immediate connection with them, often as friends or as landlords. Besides, many of them were as hard drinkers as the most besotted clowns on their estates. " A poor man," said Defoe in 1700, "gets drunk in a country alehouse. 'Why, are you not ashamed to be such a beast?' says a good, honest neighbour to him next day. 'Ashamed!' says the fellow. ' Why should I be ashamed? Why, there was Sir John ——, and Sir Robert ——, and the Parson, and they were all as drunk as I. And why a beast, pray? I heard Sir Robert —— say, that,—
"'He that drinks least,
Is most like a beast.'"
These were the sort of men who had the licensing of country alehouses in those days. Such men as these were Justices of the Peace, and with the clergy and the overseers, had the fate, moral as well as material, of the English labourer in their hands. During the latter part of the seventeenth century and the commencement of the eighteenth century, the power of these rural magnates must have been overwhelming. The dissenting yeomen who, during the middle of the century had taken so important a stand, had to choose between losing their souls or becoming criminals; as to the clergy, they played the part of the shepherd's dog rather than the shepherd, barking at and biting the poor sheep in the interest of their masters, the gentry. The spirit of their religion is set forth in the Conventicle Act, 16 Car. II., c. 4, which enforced anew the Statute of 35 Eliz. 1, by which all above the age of sixteen absenting themselves from church without cause for the space of a month, persuading others to be present at a Conventicle,
