Booze Cruise

According to an apocryphal story, the teetotaller George Brown once verbally attacked his opponent John A. Macdonald, an alcoholic, while at a campaign stop. Following Brown’s speech, the future prime minister raised himself from his seat, turned around, and threw up. Wiping his mouth afterward, he declared, “Forgive me, but I always do that when I hear George Brown speak.”

Dan Malleck’s Liquor and the Liberal State is replete with similar accounts of activists and politicians hurling insults at one another throughout nineteenth-century Ontario. At the heart of their debates, Malleck argues, was the question of how to run a liberal state — that is, a state that protects an individual’s right to vote, to worship as one pleases, to own property, and to speak freely. As a “rational actor,” a citizen could and should “engage in the sort of debate that shaped the structure” of...