to licentious attacks which fell little short of violence.  It is hardly necessary to comment on the hard drinking and the hard swearing which were almost universal characteristics of gentlemen of fashion.  Duelling was still a custom, and gambling was the favorite amusement at court, at the clubs, and in ladies’ drawing-rooms.  The title of gentleman depended on birth, and had nothing to do with personal conduct.  Caste feeling was very strong.  Gentlemen looked upon professional men or men of letters as beneath them, however superior they might be in manners, morals, or education.  A curious instance of this caste feeling occurred in the case of Captain Vratz, who said of himself and companions on their way to the gallows for murder, that “God would show them some respect as they were gentlemen.”  When Gay’s “Beggar’s Opera” was put on the stage, the fashionable world crowded to see their own coarseness and immorality exhibited in the persons of thieves and highwaymen, and to laugh at the truth of the Beggar’s words:  “Through the whole piece you may observe such a similitude of manners in high and low life, that it is difficult to determine whether (in the fashionable vices) the fine gentlemen imitate the gentlemen of the road, or the gentlemen of the road the fine gentlemen.”

The lower classes of society were as ignorant and brutal as the higher were coarse and corrupt.  Among the other qualities in which the times were deficient, was philanthropy.  The measures which the wisdom and charity of the present have exerted to diminish crime, and to improve the condition of the poor, were then represented only by a harsh and cruel penal code, which had a powerful, though an indirect tendency to promote pauperism and to multiply criminals.  Although population had greatly increased, no new provision had been made for religious teaching, and there were no schools but those of Edward and Elizabeth.[137] Defective poor-laws, which forbade laborers to move from one parish to another in search of work, made pauperism in many cases the inevitable fate of the industrious.  In the cities there was no adequate police regulation of the criminal classes; and this, too, at a time when peaceful habits were fast growing among the people at large, and police protection was more needed than ever before.  At the same time there came upon the lower classes, the terrible scourge of gin.  Violent and ignorant as these classes were, the effects upon them of so cheap and maddening a drink were incalculably debasing.  “The drunkenness of the common people,” says an eye-witness, “was so universal by the retailing of a liquor called gin, with which they could get drunk for a groat, that the whole town of London, and many towns in the country swarmed with drunken people of both sexes from morning to night, and were more like a scene from a Bacchanal than the residence of a civil society."[138] The sign which hangs over the inn-door in Hogarth’s picture of Gin Lane, and announces