Time & Perspective Quote by George Saintsbury

“It is the unbroken testimony of all history” is doing the heavy lifting here: Saintsbury isn’t merely praising drink, he’s staging a mock-triumphal march of evidence to bully the reader into assent. The phrase sounds like a judge’s summation, but it’s really a critic’s sleight of hand, swapping the messy record of “history” for a tidy, unanimous witness that conveniently agrees with his appetite. The certainty is the joke and the weapon.

Saintsbury’s intent sits in the late-19th/early-20th century crossfire between convivial literary culture and the rising moral machinery of temperance. As a writer and critic famous for celebrating wine, he’s defending pleasure as civilization’s badge. But he does it by dressing hedonism in Victorian authority: “strongest, wisest, handsomest” reads like a parody of imperial self-congratulation. He’s flattering a particular audience - educated, Anglo-European, confident in its right to define “best” - and inviting them to see abstinence as an outsider’s posture, almost a rejection of greatness itself.

The subtext is thornier. By tying alcohol to “best races,” Saintsbury borrows the era’s racial hierarchy talk, implying that drinking is not just harmless but culturally authenticated by the people deemed superior. That move isn’t incidental; it’s rhetorical insulation. If the “best” have always drunk, then critics of drink are cast as prudes fighting history, progress, even biology.

What makes the line work is its brazen overreach. It’s witty in its swagger, but it also exposes how easily “tradition” becomes an alibi: a confident voice declaring that whatever the elite enjoyed must be evidence of their excellence, not a habit with consequences.