AN EARLY TEMPERANCE TRACT.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume XVII, Issue 968, 24 September 1908, Page 21

AN EARLY TEMPERANCE TRACT.

It is open to the social historian to spectuiate how far the so-called “ crying evils ” of the day are an affair of journalistic and literary tradition rather than of actual induction from statistics. It is assumed by many excellent people that England is rapidly degenerating owing to habits of intemperance, to the growth of gambling and immorality, to the love of pleasure, and to the pursuit of gain, but these censors of their time are not students of history and the evolution of manners. Rather they are highly suggestionised readers of cheap newspapers and followers of particular prophets whose tradition in both cases may be said to date back to the palmy days of Puritanism. As long ago as 1628 William Prynne published the first rabid temperance tract under the title, “ Healthes Sicknesse, or a Compendious and briefe Discourse, proving the Drinking, and Pledging of Healthes, to be Sinfull and utterly Unlawfull unto Christians; by Arguments, Scriptures, Fathers, Moderne Divines, Christian Authors, Historians, Councers; Imperiall Lawes and Constitutions and by the voice and verdict of the prophane and Heathen Writers.” It is a question whether Prynne did not set going for all time the bogey of national intemperance. He seems to have been among the first to discover that drunkenness was par excellence the national vice, but

he believed this failing to be a recent introduction into England. According to him the custom of drinking healths came into England from Europe—from Germany, Poland, and Scandmavia. He condemned the custom as a relic of primitive devilworship, and rightly maintained that, owing to the principle of “ no heeltaps,” it involved an excess of drinking which was injurious to health. He fails to recognise that AngloSaxons have always been robust drinkers, and he attributes all the intemperance of his age—which was very nearly the period of Falstaff — to the habit of “ healthing.” His learning is so vast and his citations from Greek and Roman writers are so copious that we are inclined to believe him to have been rather a student of books than an observer of facts.—“ The Lancet.”