A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

and the second brother exclaims:
How charming is divine Philosophy!
Not harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose,
But musical as is Apollo’s lute.
The girl, naturally, defeats the sorcerer’s wicked designs without the slightest effort - so easily that
the contest seems unfair. But Milton is not being merely ‘moral’; he had discovered that ideas can
be as bracing as a cold wind, and that the individual’s conscience is the most powerful weapon he
possesses.
The English enjoyed their Puritanism; it tasted of freedom. The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)
expressed this new sense of individual responsibility. ‘Do you see yonder shining light? He said, I
think I do. Then said the Evangelist, Keep that light in your eye, and go up directly thereto...’
So when King Charles assured his people that God had made him king, and that in obeying him
they would be obeying God, they replied that they had their own shining light, and cut off his head.
When King James II tried to reintroduce Catholicism twenty years later, they sent an invitation to
the Protestant William of Orange to come and take his throne.
We find it hard to understand why the English responded with such enthusiasm to this rather
joyless religion of Puritanism. The answer is simple. When a man possesses any kind of deep inner
conviction, he is happy; what is more, his happiness is founded on a rock. When he lacks
conviction, he is a drifting ship without a rudder. It is impossible to study human criminality for
long without realising that it is a history of rudderless ships.
A few years before William of Orange invaded England, a certain Professor Sylvius of Leyden
invented a new medicine which he called genéva, from the French word geniévre. It was made of
cheap alcohol - distilled from corn mash - but given a sharp and pleasant flavouring with berries of
the geniévre - or juniper. It was sold in small bottles in chemists’ shops, and the Dutch soon
realised that geneva was as potent as good brandy, and far cheaper. When William and Mary
installed themselves on James’s throne in 1688, their countrymen began to export the new drink to
England. Since England was quarrelling with France, and was therefore reluctant to buy French
brandy, geneva - or gin - quickly became the national drink. Because of the brandy embargo, a law
was passed permitting anyone to distill his own drink, and the English soon improved on the Dutch
original, distilling an even cheaper grade of corn mash, and producing a powerful spirit that would
now be called moonshine. (It is also probably a safe bet that this was when someone discovered
that beer could be distilled to produce whisky.) Gin shops opened all over England - one London
street had six of them.
Queen Elizabeth’s subjects had drunk sherry (Falstaff’s ‘sack’), beer and wine, which were cheap -
wine cost fourpence a quart. Then James I had succeeded in raising some of the money parliament
refused to grant him by taxing various commodities, including wine and sherry, so that the English
working man of the seventeenth century could only afford beer. By 1688, the English working
classes were alcohol-starved. The consumption of gin rose steadily, from half a million gallons
around 1690 to three and a half million by 1727 and - by the middle of the century - to nineteen
million gallons.
The result was a crime wave. Many gin shops carried the notice; ‘Drunk for a penny, dead drunk
for twopence, clean straw for nothing.’ Crimes to obtain money for gin became as common as