George Barrell Cheever: Deacon Giles' distillery (1844)

Its mildness as combined with the native juices of the grape and the apple, could have done but comparatively little evil. It is manifest that most of the drunkenness of antiquity proceeded not from purely fermented drinks, but from their combination with drags, whose poisonous nature soon overthrew the strongest constitutions. When the art of distillation was discovered, then was there brought, as it were from the bottomless pit, a pestilence which in the language of a European writer, lias been "more destructive than any plague that ever reigned in Christendom, more malignant than any other epidemic pestilence that ever desolated our suffering race, whether in the shape of the burning and contagious typhus, the loathsome and mortal small-pox, the cholera of the East, or the yellow fever of the West; a disease far more loathsome, infectious and destructive than all of them put together, with all their dread array of suffering and death, united in one ghastly assemblage of horrific and appalling misery."

Curiosity has searched the annals of nations to learn the individual or people who first produced this terrible engine of evil. It is evident that the Greeks and Romans were entire strangers to the art. No allusion is made to it either in the works of Pliny, a Roman of great distinction in the first century, or of Galen, an eminent physician who lived a century later. Among the Chinese there had long been a species of distillation by which they were enabled to extract the essence or aroma of flowers, but it never seemed to be used for the purpose of preparing an intoxicating liquor.

The first European writer who mentions the use of ardent spirit was Arnoldus de Villa, a Spanish physician of the thirteenth century; but it is generally believed that its great discoverer was a Mahommedan alchemist of Arabia, who lived in the ninth century, and who was torturing nature in pursuit of an universal solvent by which man might convert all things into gold. The name Alcohol was first applied to the fluid produced by the distilling process, by Raymond Lully a disciple of Arnoldus, who believed it to be an emanation of the divinity which was at once to effect a physical renovation of the human race.

The new medicine, for such it was esteemed and not as an ordinary beverage, spread by his recommendation through the northern sections of Europe. It was first used for the purposes of common life by the laborers in the Hungarian mines, to preserve them from the cold and damps. Distillation was introduced into Ireland earlier than England. In 1556, an Act of Parliament was passed at Drogheda against it, the distilled liquor being described in the Act, " As a drink nothing profitable to be daily drunk or used." In the reign of Henry II. it found its way into England, and from that period, it was no longer considered merely as a medicinal agent, but went into general use as an article of diet; and such has been the passion for ardent spirit among the British population, that 40,000,000 gallons annually have been consumed, besides an immense amount of fermented drinks