Shop-keepers, tapsters, brewers, bakers, grocers and workingmen charged a difierence of eighty, ninety or a hundred per cent, between sewant and beaver in taking pay for their goods or their labor. The Council struggled bravely to enhance the value of the sewant by resorting to the fiction that values can be controlled by arbitrary enactment. Its next law (November 11, 1658) was " that the brewers, tapsters, bakers, and other shopkeepers and common grocers, should sell the daily

MANNERS AND CUSTOMS.

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necessary family commodities to the buyers at their different prices, to wit, silver money, beavers and sewant: as forinstance, the brewers should deliver one barrel of good beer for ten guilders (about #3.80) in silver money, according to the Holland value of fifteen guilders in beavers, the beaver at eight guilders to twenty-two guilders ; in sewant eight white or four black for a stuyver."

It is testimony to the drinking customs of the Dutch families' that beer and wine were estimated by the law as necessaries of which no household should be deprived by exorbitant or fluctuating prices.

The cost of the malt liquor was made little enough in this ordinance of l<i58, and it was equally accommodating in providing that French wine should cost no more than eighteen stuyvers (nine cents) the pint in silver money ; Spanish wine no more than twenty-four stuyvers, and brandywine only five stuyvers for a gill. Yet these prices, which were ofticial, so to

' Their English successors followed them bravely in this respect The amount of liquor it required to help in conducting an election in New York in 17SS-,39 wim something staitlins;. The 3fa/7o;iii« o/ --liiiericon //is(oi;/ for Dt'cenibcr, 1884, printed the following bill, indorsed as election expenses for those years and divide<l equally between James Alexander and Kventhuss Van Home: