THE SCOTS HAVE LONG had a problematic relationship with alcohol. The quotation above from the Reverend John Bruce, minister of Forfar, shows that, even before the rise of the temperance movement in the 1820s, ministers of the Church of Scotland were critical of the role played by ale houses, dram shops and tippling huts in the lives of their parishioners. The (Old) Statistical Accounts, published in the 1790s on a parish-by-parish basis, are full of criticisms by Presbyterian ministers of rising levels of crime, drunkenness, alcoholism and consequent impoverishment of families, as a result of the replacement of beer by whisky as the drink of choice for the masses. Their anxieties were strengthened because this was a period of rapid social and economic change, with large-scale population growth and population movement, growing urbanisation and industrialisation, accompanied by widening social divisions. It was also a period in which existing social and political orthodoxies were being challenged, as the examples of American independence and revolutionary France lent encouragement to republicans, secularists and others who questioned the existing social, religious and political order. Pubs and ale houses were closely involved in these changes, as public spaces, often below the radar of the authorities, where artisans, labourers, craftsmen, farmers, shopkeepers and others could meet to discuss matters including economics, work, religion and politics, as well as local gossip. For example, the Reverend John Scott of Perth, a substantial burgh with a population of 19,800 in 1792, condemned ‘the lamentable effects which happen to some persons, from their being too ready to leave their loom, or their workshop, to meet in companies, or in clubs, or in the ale house.’