It may be proposed, as an expedient for the preservation of our foreign trade, that the duty shall be repaid upon exportation; but the event of this provision, my lords, will be, that great quantities will be sent to sea for the sake of obtaining a repayment of the duty, which, instead of being sold to foreigners, will be privately landed again upon our own coasts.

Thus, my lords, will the duty be collected, and afterwards repaid; and the government will suffer the odium of imposing a severe tax, and incur the expense of employing a great number of officers, without any advantage to the publick.  Spirits will, in many parts of the kingdom, be very little dearer than at present, and drunkenness and debauchery will still prevail.

That these arts, and a thousand others, will be practised by the people to obtain this infatuating liquor, cannot be doubted.  It cannot be imagined that they will forbear frauds, who have had recourse to violence, or that those will not endeavour to elude the government, who have already defied it.

Every rigorous law will be either secretly evaded, or openly violated; every severe restraint will be shaken off, either by artifice or vice; nor can this vice, however dangerous or prevalent, be corrected but by slow degrees, by straitening the reins of government imperceptibly, and by superadding a second slight restraint, after the nation has been for some time habituated to the first.

That the government proceeds by these easy and gentle methods of reformation, ought not to be imputed to negligence, but necessity; for so far has the government been from any connivance at this vice, that an armed force was necessary to support the laws which were made to restrain it, and secure the chief persons of the state from the insults of the populace, whom they had only provoked by denying them this pernicious liquor.

Since, therefore, my lords, all opposition to this predominant inclination has appeared without effect, since the government evidently wants power to conquer the united and incessant struggles for the liberty of drunkenness, what remains but that this vice should produce some advantage to the publick, in return for the innumerable evils which arise from it, and that the government should snatch the first opportunity of taxing that vice which cannot be reformed?

This duty arises, indeed, from a concurrence of different causes, of just designs in the government, and of bad inclinations in the people.  The tax is just, and well meant; but it can be made sufficient to support the expenses to which it is appropriated, only by the resolution of the populace to continue, in some degree, their usual luxury.

I am far, my lords, from thinking this method of raising money eligible for its own sake, or justifiable by any other plea than that of necessity.  If it were possible at once to extinguish the thirst of spirits, no man who had any regard for virtue, or for happiness, would propose to augment the revenue by a tax upon them.