that, in a lawful occupation, are accessory to the introduction and increase of all the sloth, sottishness, want, and misery which the abuse of strong waters is the immediate cause of, to lift above mediocrity perhaps half a dozen men that deal in the same commodity by wholesale; whilst among the retailers, though qualified as I required, a much greater number are broke and ruined, for not abstaining from the Circean cup they hold out to others; and the more fortunate are their whole lifetime obliged to take the uncommon pains, endure the hardships, and swallow all the ungrateful and shocking things I named, for little or nothing beyond a bare sustenance, and their daily bread. A PARABLE OF SMALL BEER IN old heathen times there was, they say, a whimsical country, where the people talked much of religion, and the greatest part as to outward appearance seemed really devout the chief moral evil among them was thirst, and to quench it a damnable sin; yet they unanimously agreed that every one was born thirsty more or less small beer in moderation was allowed to all, and he was counted an hypocrite, a cynic, or a madman, who pretended that one could live altogether without it; yet, those who owned they loved it, and drank it to excess, were counted wicked. All this while the beer itself was reckoned a blessing from heaven, and there was no harm in the use of it all the enormity lay in the abuse, the motive of the heart, that made them drink it. He that took the least drop of it to quench his thirst, committed a heinous crime, whilst others drank large quantities without any guilt, so they did it indifferently, and for no other reason than to mend their complexion. They brewed for other countries as well as their own, and for the small beer they sent abroad, received large returns of Westphalia hams, neats' tongues, hung beef, and Bolonia sausages, red herrings, pickled sturgeon, caviare, anchovies, and everything that was proper to make their liquor go down with pleasure. Those who kept great stores of small beer by them without making use of it were generally envied, and at the same time very odious to the public, and nobody was easy that had not enough of it come to his own share. The greatest calamity they thought could befall them, was to keep their hops and barley upon their hands, and the more they yearly consumed of them, the more they reckoned the country to flourish. The government had made very wise regulations concerning the returns that were made for their exports, encouraged very much the importation of salt and pepper, and laid heavy duties on everything that was not well seasoned, and might any wise obstruct the sale of their own hops and barley. Those at the helm, when they acted in public, showed themselves on all accounts exempt and wholly divested from thirst, made several laws to prevent the growth of it, and punish the wicked who openly dared to quench it. If you examined them in their private persons, and pry'd narrowly into their lives and conversations, they seemed to be more fond, or at least drank larger draughts of small beer than others, but always under pretence that the mending of complexions required greater quantities of liquor in them, than it did in those they ruled over; and that what they had chiefly at heart, without any regard to themselves, was to procure great plenty of small beer among the subjects in general, and a great demand for their hops and barley. As nobody was debarred from small beer, the clergy made use of it as well as the laity, and some of them very plentifully, yet all of them desired to be thought less thirsty by their functions than others, and never would own that they drank any but to mend their complexions. In their religious assemblies they were more sincere; for as soon as they came there, they all openly confessed, the clergy as well as the laity, from the highest to the lowest, that they were thirsty, that mending their complexions was what they minded the least, and that all their hearts were set upon small beer and quenching their thirst, whatever they might pretend to the contrary. What was remarkable is, that to have laid hold of those truths to anyone's prejudice, and made use of those confessions out of their temples, would have been counted very impertinent, and everybody thought it a heinous affront to be called thirsty, though you had seen him drink small beer by whole gallons. The chief topic of their preachers was the great evil of thirst, and the folly there was in quenching it. They exhorted their hearers to resist the temptations of it, inveighed against small beer, and often told them it was poison, if they drank it with pleasure, or with any other design than to mend their complexions. In their acknowledgments to the gods, they thanked them for the plenty of comfortable small beer they had received from them, notwithstanding they had so little deserved it, and continually quenched their thirst with it; whereas they were so thoroughly satisfied that it was given them for a better use. Having begged pardon for these offences, they desired the gods to lessen their thirst, and give them strength to resist the importunities of it; yet in the midst of their sorest repentance, and most humble supplications, they never forgot small beer, and prayed that they might continue to have it in great plenty, with a solemn promise, that however neglectful soever they might hitherto have been in this point, they would for the future not drink a drop of it with any other design than to mend their complexions. These were standing petitions put together to last; and having continued to be made use of without any alterations for several hundred years together, it was thought by some, that the gods, who understood futurity, and knew that the same promise they heard in June would be made to them the January following, did not rely much more on these vows, than we do on those waggish inscriptions by which men offer us their goods, "To-day for money, and to-morrow for nothing." They often began their prayers very mystically, and spoke many things in a spiritual sense; yet, they never were so abstract from the world in them, as to end one without beseeching the gods to bless and prosper the brewing trade in all its branches, and for the good of the whole, more and more to increase the consumption of hops and barley. LORD SHAFTESBURY [Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, was born in 1671. His education was superintended by Locke, which probably accounts for his reaction from the Lockian philosophy. He was at Winchester from 1683 to 1686. He sat for a time in Parliament, but for the most part he lived the life of a student in ill-health. He was a traveller; he visited Holland, and made the acquaintance of Bayle, and in 1708 he began to publish pamphlets, mainly on ethical subjects. The most important of these is the Enquiry concerning Virtue or Merit. They are reprinted in a collection entitled Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, and Times (1711). In 1709 he married, and in 1712 he died. A fine edition of the Characteristics was printed by Baskerville in 1773, and the first volume has been more recently edited by Mr. Hatch. Two or three specimens of his correspondence have also been printed; the most interesting is the Letters written by a Noble Lord to a Young Man at the University (1716). The student may consult Professor Fowler's Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, Professor Sidgwick's History of Ethics, and Mr. Leslie Stephen's English Thought in the Eighteenth Century.] IN the essentials of their philosophical position, Shaftesbury and Henry More are at one. Both represent the refusal, the characteristically English refusal, to accept the formulas of Hobbes and Locke as the last word on things human and divine. Both point to the unexplored fields, the unexplained residuum of the spiritual life, which those formulas fail to touch. Yet in all else they are each other's antipodes. More is eminently of the seventeenth century-poet, dreamer, Platonist, abhorrent of system, and ever hunting the shy, elusive fringes of truth, he presents a world full of mystery and colour, rich with gracious half-lights and reverent shadows. Not so Shaftesbury: sceptical where More is credulous, clear where More is vague, he wields for imagination the dry light of analysis, and champions the spiritual in a tone that robs it of its spirituality. He is one of the first embodiments of the eighteenth century spirit in speculation, and has all the merits and most of the defects which we habitually associate with that spirit. He writes in a style which is consummately easy and lucid. There are none of those obscurities and experimental reaches of thought which in other thinkers one sometimes finds so puzzling and so suggestive; his meaning may not be very profound, but it is at least expressed for the better understanding of the plain man. He brings into English prose an order and a clearness of which it was beginning to stand in some need. The worst that can be said of him is that he is terribly affected-" genteel" was Charles Lamb's epithet. He is not always in buckram; he will unbend to you; but all the same his treatises invariably smack of the superior person, the man of birth, debarred by circumstances from his natural pursuit of politics, and condescending to while away a part of his too abundant leisure in unravelling some niceties of the intellect. Unwilling to appear a pedant, he falls into the opposite vices of desultoriness and superficiality. As a thinker Shaftesbury made definite and prominent an important principle of morals—that man is not a solitary unit, to be treated in vacuo as a self-contained whole; but rather a centre of forces in a complex society, dependent on others at every turn, with desires and modes of conduct inextricably entangled with theirs. Or, to use a phraseology nearer his own, Shaftesbury taught that man's benevolent impulses are as fundamental and natural, as much a part of man himself, as those which are selfregarding and that an ethical scheme which takes into account the one and neglects the other must needs be one-sided and incomplete. He struck a real blot in the reasoning of his predecessors, and laid down the lines on which English psychological ethics were to proceed for some time to come. : Shaftesbury's moral doctrine is positive enough, but he had his negative side also. The element of analysis, of criticism, in him led him into the camp of the unorthodox, and he ranks among the able, if transient, school of English Deists. Hence his influence over French thought, as French thought culminated in the worship of the Supreme Reason; while he is at one with Voltaire, as well as with certain brilliant writers, both French and English, of our own day, in finding the true solvent of superstition and fanaticism, not in persecution, but in humour. E. K. CHAMBERS. |