as it was in times of a much later date, to charge everything untoward upon French influence. There is a tale of an English county which grew a great quantity of beans, and the agricultural interest there got up a petition to parliament, praying that a county adjoining should be prohibited from growing broad Windsors; thus lowering the price of that indigestible esculent to the petitioners' manifest injury. Just so stanch to their prejudices, and seeing nothing but popery and wooden shoes when France was named, they petitioned for a prohibitive law, and insisted that no more Gallie goods of any kind should come into the country. The price of land had fallen in the market; and this, they averred, was owing to the balance of trade with France being against us. They had no idea that the aggregate balance of trade might be in our favour, and that in place of paying the difference to France in coin, we might have paid it in bills on other countries given in return for our exports. They were not to be pacified. Nothing less than a total prohibition of wine, brandy, and all kinds of French merchandise and produce would appease them. They were all-powerful with the national antipathies on their side. The act was passed just when our commercial transactions had reached a state of prosperity unequalled before. At once an import of wines, which for many centuries it had till then been the usage of the country to receive, and to which the people had long been habituated, wholly ceased. In some years nearly twenty thousand tuns had been imported; it now became an illegal trade. A vote of the House of Commons declared that "trade with France was detrimental to the kingdom."

The effect of this sudden prohibition upon those who had been accustomed, like their fathers before them, for six or seven hundred years to the wines of France, must have been a public calamity. Smuggling was encouraged to a great extent, and the wines of Portugal, of a very inferior character to those of France in purity, were introduced under the circumstances of the restriction.

But the prohibition of the pure wines of France was not the only consequence of the erroneous notion about land being lowered in price by a commerce of any kind with France. The farmers were gratified; brandy being no longer imported, distillation from malt was left almost unrestricted. Any person might distil by giving ten days' notice to the Excise. This was a boon to the landholder, who had most probably calculated upon such a result in aiding the prohibition. The Vintners' Company in London had before kept the management of distillation almost wholly under its own control, but it was now foiled; distillation continued to be encouraged for the protection of the landed interest down to the reign of George I. Then began that system of drunkenness among the poor, from the cheapness of spirits, that has deteriorated their health and morals so fearfully to this hour. The government now took the alarm at its own impolicy. It ran into the opposite extreme, and forbade any compound spirits to be made. This was followed by the imposition of a duty of five shillings per gallon, with a license costing twenty pounds, to be paid by all dealers in English-made spirits.

The suddenness of this legislation, without the slightest reflection that the government had been the cause of the evil it sought to remedy so abruptly, drove the people to illicit distillation and evasions of the law,

the natural consequences of an ill-judged exercise of the legislative power. The retailing of spirits was then prohibited altogether.

Scarcely had the general importation been once more permitted, and French wines nearly recovered their former amount of importation, than the accession of William III. and a new war occurred, tantamount to a second prohibition. The plea of exchanging woollen goods for Portugal wine, under a differential duty which operated as a bonus, was in every sense impolitic and unjust. The bait was eagerly swallowed by the leading party. Spanish wines as well as French were rejected, although the duty was little different between the wines of Spain and Portugal. An importation of eleven thousand tuns of Spanish, in 1701, sank to seven thousand in the following year, and in the next to thirteen hundred ; nor did the Spanish importation increase again until 1709, so deeply did the pseudo appeal to patriotism in the shape of our woollen manufactures and the British fleece carry away the sense of the country.

The introduction of the wines of Portugal did not occur without considerable opposition from those who were accustomed to the wines of other countries. The feeling of those who were for rejecting everything French had aroused the jealousy of the lovers of the wine of that country, This was shown in periodical publications circulated as early as 1693. The tastes of the wine-drinkers and of the majority in the legislature were opposed. The "Farewell to Wine," published in that year, treats the black strap of Portugal very unceremoniously:

Mark how it smells-methinks a real pain

Is by its odour thrown upon my brain:
I've tasted it 'tis spiritless and flat,

This refers to the

And has as many different tastes,

As can be found in compound pastes.

We

lack of the true vinous bouquet in port wine. learn, too, that its modern virtue of spirituousness was at that time not among its failings. Prior makes several references to port wine, which show the dislike entertained towards it subsequently to the above date. Even as late as 1733, "muddy Portugal wine " was contrasted with claret, to the great disadvantage of the former. The addition of brandy was early noticed. There is no reason to think this spirit was added in any great quantity until the Oporto Company was established, and adulteration and monopoly had been systematised. It was said that without brandy port wine would not suit the English palate, which had taken pure growths for centuries. It is possible, however, that the spirit-drinking, encouraged for the sake of consuming the produce of the land by distillation, had now in some degree raised the temperature of the stomachs of Englishmen, so that the drinker, no longer able to select a wine as cheap as port, it became necessary for the merchant to adapt the cheap growth to the high-seasoned taste, or rather, as at present, keep a variety of the same wine artificially concocted, to suit the taste of all inquirers after any particular flavour, a great convenience to the dealer rather difficult to effect with pure, natural wine. This was confessed in substance in the late evidence before the House of Commons. We are there told how, under the well-sustained monopoly of the company at Oporto, wine is mingled with the adulterating liquid, called

Gerupiga, to suit all tastes and all hues, from "black, sweet, and strong," to the true colour of the blood of the grape, and a dry taste of the most approved character. We are also told how many pipes of this mixture of elderberries, treacle, sugar, brandy, and must, are sent to this country for the same base purpose. * The Lusitanian adulterations have been more barefaced than ever of late years.

Claret was once the favourite wine throughout Scotland, and the disrelish for port was shown by making the neutral ground of the Isle of Man a grand depôt for the wines of the Gironde. From thence the French wines were covertly introduced in such a way by the intricacies of the western rocks and isles, that the "eyes of the guager saw them not." This contraband trade was continued there to a much later period than in England. The lines of Home, which Sir Walter Scott used to repeat, conveyed the spirit of the people upon the exclusion of French wine:

Bold and erect the Caledonian stood,

Old was his mutton, and his claret good ;

"Let him drink port," the English statesmen cried,
He drank the poison, and his spirit died!

No less than five thousand hogsheads of claret are said to have been smuggled into Cornwall, Devon, and Dorset, at the time of its total prohibition. It is clear that port wine was forced, in the first instance, upon the public in the way of "Hobson's choice;" that in a generation or two it became naturalised, and as that occurred, the abuses and adulterations of the wine continued to increase, while, after 1820, they have become much greater than before. Since the peace and the winemarket of the world is once more opened to us, the wine of Oporto, which at one time was a seventy-fifth per cent. of all consumed, has fallen in consumption to less than the fortieth. Notwithstanding its acclimation, here we are just beginning to receive again a variety of wines of the existence of which a few years ago we were in total ignorance, but the resistance to their introduction is great on the part of those attached to the old system.

We dwell upon this part of the subject the more, because it conveys a true picture of the evils of a system which was so long and strenuously advocated, to the protraction of an opposite commercial policy, and of a wiser course in raising the revenue. Yet this very system, namely, a free interchange of commodities, was offered by France to England at the treaty of Utrecht, under the auspices of De Torcy, the French minister; but it was regarded by the ruling party in parliament as an insidious attempt to injure Great Britain. It did, in fact, carry an appearance of equity too evidently not to be suspected by the influential party in the government of that time, with its strong feeling of private interest, and its crude notions of the true principles of traffic.

De Torcy desired a commercial treaty in the spirit of that concluded with Charles II., the tariffs of the two nations to be the same. But rents had fallen subsequently to that treaty, and it became the imputed cause, as already stated, in alluding to the prohibition of French pro

*The adulterous mixture is 56lbs. of dried elderberries, 60 of treacle or coarse brown sugar, 78 gallons of unfermented grape-juice, and 39 of brandy.

duce-rents, it was inferred erroneously, must fall again if such a treaty were concluded. The noble author of the picture of a Patriot King treated De Torcy's offer with unwonted disdain. His metaphysics and philosophy did not enable him to foresee the inevitable results of the Methuen treaty concluded ten years before. It cost more than a century and a quarter of time to force the national taste by the argument of the pocket, and to rivet a prejudice another century may not obliterate. The magic lay in the word "wool," the manufactures of which were to flourish the more the longer they were steeped in the blood of the Portugal grape, fevered with brandy. Yet, in 1801, and in the time of the largest import of the wine of Portugal, we received only from seven to eight million pounds of foreign wool, our own not sufficing, under the famed differential duties, and in 1849 we imported nearly seventy-seven millions.

The old wine company was formed at Oporto under the pretence of correcting abuses in making and exporting wines. The true ground of its formation was to create a monopoly to keep up prices which had before been low, and regulated in the open market. The first natural result of the Methuen treaty, made when the Portuguese were ignorant of the shortest way of preparing wine for exportation to England, was the neglect of all improvement. The second, the best part of twenty years afterwards, was that the Portuguese, to save trouble, deteriorated the wine by mingling at first a small quantity of brandy, about three gallons to the pipe, while fermentation was proceeding. Before this the wine was a pure, natural, sound growth, wholesome and vinous. The practice was then styled "diabolical" by the English merchants; what epithet it now deserves, when twenty-five gallons of spirit are added to the pipe, displacing the same number of wine gallons, in place of that amount in wine, it is not difficult to imagine.

Oporto was in future to be the only place of export for the district specified, including all the vineyards in which the Methuen wine was grown. The place of exit was under the absolute control of the company. They made specious excuses for the monopoly in professing how they would correct abuses. There was to be no bad vine-dressing, no elderberry colouring, and a just classification of wines. The market was to be opened at a fixed day. It need not be remarked that the whole was an odious monopoly to sustain prices artificially, which the excellent climate of the Douro and the zeal of the farmer would have kept down. They succeeded in getting up the prices, and in maintaining them, there is every reason to think, with inferior wine to what had been before made. Don Pedro wisely abolished this shameful monopoly in 1834. Habits, connexions, and capital interlocked for above a century, it required time to disunite and change from injurious to beneficial action. Oporto was declared a free port. The old system was still powerful when, in 1842, the company was restored with an influence irresistible. Attached to it was the right of exacting most oppressive export duties from the English merchants. Those duties, and a permit to pass wine out of Oporto, raised the cost of wine six or seven pounds a pipe; so that it is now worth the trouble to export the wine via America to England. The export duties are all included in the small sum of sixpence to exporters anywhere out of Europe, where little wine of Oporto will be

swallowed except by Englishmen, to whom it is peculiar. It is evident, therefore, against whom the impost is directed. The imposition, too, is in violation of the express words of a treaty, the object of which was to secure free and unrestrained permission to Englishmen to buy and sell, without preference or favour shared by others, throughout the realm of Portugal. The shufflings, evasions, and trickery displayed in the evidence, however disgusting, render its perusal useful to show how far the public may be abused by exclusive trading privileges. The adulterations of the first company seem to have increased notoriously after 1820, whence the remark of many elderly persons who are fond of port is well founded, that they are obliged to leave it off, "for it is not like what they were accustomed to take formerly."

With a continual increase of produce, although some estates are not half cultivated, the monopoly keeps prices higher now, when only three millions of gallons and a little more are consumed in England, than in the beginning of the century, when we consumed five or six millions. It is the only mercantile commodity in which increase of quantity is powerless to lessen price. Let us see how Portuguese ingenuity manages. In 1851, it appeared that ninety-five thousand pipes had been grown. Of this the company declared forty-one thousand odd hundreds to be of prime quality. This was too much to maintain prices, and the company ordered that no more than twenty thousand should be exported in Europe! The difference of the forty-one thousand firstclass pipes they added to another class of eighteen thousand out of the quantity they had rated second, thus falsely denominating second more than one-half of the first quality, knowing that not more than five thousand could be disposed of. This Portuguese trick is not repeated every year in this precise mode, because sometimes the second class is transferred to the first, if it be necessary to increase the quantity of what they call first, or for any other cause; the infusion of brandy and colouring matter equalising differences in taste. Nor was this all, because the merchant who wanted to export the best wine was only allowed to export that which the company had adulterated, unless he had recourse to stratagem. He therefore purchased a permit as for the company's wine to go out, giving three pounds sterling for the document, and substituting the wine he wished to send in place of that which it was only legal, under the company's auspices, to send away. Thus eminent merchants here managed to get a little good wine out of the country by smuggling, the company itself winking at the breach of its own regulations, in order to extort money from the English merchant exclusively.

Such are some of the effects of the differential duty in favour of Portugal which are still in full action. The Methuen treaty drove away the wines and the consequent exchanges of goods with other countries. Port and sherry have been the staple, with a little claret and Champagne to oblige a fashionable customer. Some commercial houses affect to acknowledge no other species of wine than port and sherry, and many have heard, but never really known, any other qualities.