women, and children. Allowing for the amount exported, or sent out of the city, there remains something like four barrels to each person. This is one quart, or four of our common table-glasses, per day. But some drink none, others little; a man is scarcely reckoned with real beer-drinkers until he drinks six masses,—twenty-four of our common tumblers; ten masses are not uncommon; twenty to thirty masses—eighty to one hundred and twenty of our dinner-glasses—are drunk by some, and on a wager even much more. The sick man whose physician prescribed for him a quart of herb-tea as the only thing that would save him, and who replied that he was gone, then, for he held but a pint, was no Bavarian; for the most modest Bavarian girl would not feel alarmed in regard to her capacity, if ordered to drink a gallon,—certainly not, if the liquid were beer.
The aggregate labor performed in this branch of popular industry is thus seen at a glance. But how is this done, and by whom? What is the noise or noiselessness with which such torrents of this foaming liquid rush daily through the channels of human bodies made originally too small to admit half the quantity? What are the final results upon body, mind, and heart of the present and future of the race? Does government encourage, stimulate, control, and turn to account this national appetite? These questions invite, and will well repay, a few moments' attention.
I once heard a college student announce as the text of his oration Lindley Murray's well-known definition of the verb,—a word which signifies "to be, to do, or to suffer"; and he followed up his announcement by a most beautiful and conclusive argument to show that this definition describes with equal accuracy three classes of men into which the whole world may be divided: a class who have no purpose in life but simply "to be"; an active class, whose mission is "to do," to which they bend all their energies; and a passive class, who merely "suffer" themselves to be employed as the tools of the men of action. Whether he would have modified his statement, had he known something of Bavarian beer-drinkers, I do not know; for, although these belong, doubtless, in general, to the class of men which he designated as having no purpose but simply "to be," yet they certainly have a decided preference as to the means of their being, which must be beer; they have activity enough to get where this can be obtained, and to handle the needed quantity; and the man who holds and bears about fifteen or twenty quarts a day must have no small share of the grace of passive endurance.
There is a class of the nobility too poor to treat themselves with the diversions of court-life, and with notions of noble birth which forbid them to engage in business, especially as they would thereby forfeit their rank. They fund their small means, so as to yield them a stated income; and in spending this and their time, they fall into a round which brings them three or four times a day to some place where beer is to be found, and with it a billiard-table and a reading-room. This class does not, perhaps, embrace a very large number of the nobility, but it is largely reinforced from others, whose small means are similarly invested, and whose whole time is on their hands for disposal. The class of men engaged in business, and pursuing it somewhat actively, give less attention to beer during the day. They take a couple of glasses—four of our common tumblers—at dinner, and perhaps send out a servant occasionally during the day to replenish a pitcher for the counter,—not, however, to treat customers, as used to be done in our country; but as beer had been all day secondary to business, the latter is dropped for the evening, and the undivided attention bestowed upon the national beverage. A large portion of the poor, and many who cannot be called poor, have not the means for this indulgence; and yet men and women are seldom seen at their work without a mug of beer standing near them. Ladies have the same provision in their families, as also students, and all
