The EU bureaucrats in Brussels decided last week that discretion was the better part of valor and allowed the United Kingdom and Ireland to continue using imperial weights and measures. The bureaucrats had intended to make the metric system exclusive by 2010, but realized that if they messed with beer by the pint, they risked a popular uprising throughout the British Isles.

Chalk one up for a character that G.K. Chesterton called the rolling English drunkard, in his poem, “The Rolling English Road”:

Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,
And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;
A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread
The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.

The rolling English road symbolizes all the little peculiarities that make England, England – and woe betide any foreigner who tries to interfere:

I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire,
And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire;
But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed
To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made,
Where you and I went down the lane with ale-mugs in our hands,
The night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands.

Bonaparte went down to defeat before the Duke of Wellington, and the Brussels bureaucrats beat a hasty retreat before good stout men with ale-mugs in their hands. So beer by the pint is safe, for the time being, at least, and the rolling English road will meander on. And that’s something to celebrate. For, as Chesterton reminds us:

There is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,
Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.