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> I have a small request. Do you happen to know the occasion or citation for the > following Jefferson quote: "I think it is a great error to consider a heavy tax > on wines as a tax on luxury; on the contrary, it is a tax on the health of all > our citizens." > Any help you can give is much appreciated. The following passage sounds close enough to the quote you cite as to make it sound like a summary of the one below: "I rejoice, as a moralist, at the prospect of a reduction of the duties on wine, by our national legislature. It is an error to view a tax on that liquor as merely a tax on the rich. It is a prohibition of its use to the middling class of our citizens, and a condemnation of them to the poison of whiskey, which is desolating their houses. No nation is drunken where wine is cheap; and none sober, where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage. It is, in truth, the only antidote to the bane of whiskey. Fix but the duty at the rate of other merchandise, and we can drink wine here as cheap as we do grog; and who will not prefer it? Its extended use will carry health and comfort to a much enlarged circle. Every one in easy circumstances (as the bulk of our citizens are) will prefer it to the poison to which they are now driven by their government. And the treasury itself will find that a penny apeiece from a dozen, is more than a groat from a single one." --to Jean Guillaume, Baron Hyde de Neuville, December 13, 1818. Jefferson had earlier written along a similar vein to his Secretary of the Treasury: "I am persuaded that were the duty on cheap wines put on the same ratio with the dear, it would wonderfully enlarge the field of those who use wine, to the expulsion of whiskey. The introduction of a very cheap wine (St. George) into my neighborhodd, within two years past, has quadrupled in that time the number of those who keep wine, and will ere long increase them tenfold. This would be a great gain to the treasury, and to the sobriety of our country." --to Albert Gallatin, June 3, 1807.