Undoubtedly there may be a dangerous abuse in the excess of spirits; and at one time I am ready to believe the abuse was great.  When spirits are cheap, the business of drunkenness is achieved with little time or labor; but that evil I consider to be wholly done away.  Observation for the last forty years, and very particularly for the last thirty, has furnished me with ten instances of drunkenness from other causes for one from this.  Ardent spirit is a great medicine, often to remove distempers, much more frequently to prevent them, or to chase them away in their beginnings.  It is not nutritive in any great degree.  But if not food, it greatly alleviates the want of it.  It invigorates the stomach for the digestion of poor, meagre diet, not easily alliable to the human constitution.  Wine the poor cannot touch.  Beer, as applied to many occasions, (as among seamen and fishermen, for instance,) will by no means do the business.  Let me add, what wits inspired with champagne and claret will turn into ridicule,—­it is a medicine for the mind.  Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, men have at all times and in all countries called in some physical aid to their moral consolations,—­wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco.

I consider, therefore, the stopping of the distillery, economically, financially, commercially, medicinally, and in some degree morally too, as a measure rather well meant than well considered.  It is too precious a sacrifice to prejudice.

Gentlemen well know whether there be a scarcity of partridges, and whether that be an effect of hoarding and combination.  All the tame race of birds live and die as the wild do.

As to the lesser articles, they are like the greater.  They have followed the fortune of the season.  Why are fowls dear?  Was not this the farmer’s or jobber’s fault?  I sold from my yard to a jobber six young and lean fowls for four-and-twenty shillings,—­fowls for which two years ago the same man would not have given a shilling apiece.  He sold them afterwards at Uxbridge, and they were taken to London to receive the last hand.

As to the operation of the war in causing the scarcity of provisions, I understand that Mr. Pitt has given a particular answer to it; but I do not think it worth powder and shot.

I do not wonder the papers are so full of this sort of matter, but I am a little surprised it should be mentioned in Parliament.  Like all great state questions, peace and war may be discussed, and different opinions fairly formed, on political grounds; but on a question of the present price of provisions, when peace with the Regicides is always uppermost, I can only say that great is the love of it.