As to sheep, none, I thought, were strangers to the general failure of the article of turnips last year:  the early having been burned, as they came up, by the great drought and heat; the late, and those of the early which had escaped, were destroyed by the chilling frosts of the winter and the wet and severe weather of the spring.  In many places a full fourth of the sheep or the lambs were lost; what remained of the lambs were poor and ill fed, the ewes having had no milk.  The calves came late, and they were generally an article the want of which was as much to be dreaded as any other.  So that article of food, formerly so abundant in the early part of the summer, particularly in London, and which in a great part supplied the place of mutton for near two months, did little less than totally fail.

All the productions of the earth link in with each other.  All the sources of plenty, in all and every article, were dried or frozen up.  The scarcity was not, as gentlemen seem to suppose, in wheat only.

Another cause, and that not of inconsiderable operation, tended to produce a scarcity in flesh provision.  It is one that on many accounts cannot be too much regretted, and the rather, as it was the sole cause of a scarcity in that article which arose from the proceedings of men themselves:  I mean the stop put to the distillery.

The hogs (and that would be sufficient) which were fed with the waste wash of that produce did not demand the fourth part of the corn used by farmers in fattening them.  The spirit was nearly so much clear gain to the nation.  It is an odd way of making flesh cheap, to stop or check the distillery.

The distillery in itself produces an immense article of trade almost all over the world,—­to Africa, to North America, and to various parts of Europe.  It is of great use, next to food itself, to our fisheries and to our whole navigation.  A great part of the distillery was carried on by damaged corn, unfit for bread, and by barley and malt of the lowest quality.  These things could not be more unexceptionably employed.  The domestic consumption of spirits produced, without complaints, a very great revenue, applicable, if we pleased, in bounties, to the bringing corn from other places, far beyond the value of that consumed in making it, or to the encouragement of its increased production at home.

As to what is said, in a physical and moral view, against the home consumption of spirits, experience has long since taught me very little to respect the declamations on that subject.  Whether the thunder of the laws or the thunder of eloquence “is hurled on gin” always I am thunder-proof.  The alembic, in my mind, has furnished to the world a far greater benefit and blessing than if the opus maximum had been really found by chemistry, and, like Midas, we could turn everything into gold.