thousand dollars yearly.  In a time of popular sensitiveness, there is nothing which the government could do that would be so likely to be followed by a revolutionary outbreak as to add a kreutzer to the price of the mass or quart of beer.  This article is ranked in all police-regulations among the necessaries of life.  The bakeries and beer-houses must remain open at those holiday-hours when all other shopkeepers, except the apothecaries, must close their shops.

The statistics already given have reference to the common beer; but, besides this, the brewers have permission to brew for certain short periods what are called the double beers, without paying a tax upon them.  My statistics of the beer-drinking will, therefore, fall short of the truth, at least by this uncertain quantity.  During the brief periods of the sale of the double beers, there is a great rush for them, relieving somewhat the monotony of the ordinary routine.  The two principal kinds of double beer are the Bock-beer and the Salvator-beer.  The latter creates quite a furor.  Many, led by curiosity to the head-quarters of its sale, find their amusement there in testing the capacity of some great beer-drinker,—­and such are always on hand waiting the chance,—­by paying for all he will drink.  These curious visitors seldom return without a similar test of their own capacities; and as the article has double the alcohol of the common beer, many a one staggers a little on his homeward way who had never felt such effect from the common form of the beverage.

There is also no small amount of wine drunk in Munich.  I have not the statistics, but the number of large houses with the sign, “Weinhandlung,” and of the smaller ones with the sign, “Weinschenck,” and then the fact that at all the large hotels wine is mainly drunk at dinner, furnish my data for this conclusion.  In the wine-growing districts of Bavaria beer-drinking is reduced to about one-fourth of the Munich standard, and so we may suppose that the removal of all wine from the capital might add one-fourth to the beer-drinking as given above,—­at least, it takes the place of one-fourth of that which would be the aggregate of the beer-drinking.

The government has a commission for the examination of the quality of the beer; and, indeed, aside from this, the popular taste is not a bad test in this respect.  There is an error in the lines of Prior,—­

  “When you with High-Dutch Herren dine,
  Expect false Latin and stummed wine: 
  They never taste who always drink;
  They always talk who never think."[C]