Page:Sermon on malt.pdf/4

 IMPORTANCE OF

Temperance Societies.

Intemperance is so alarmingly on the increase in England as to have attracted the attention of the first magistrates. The use of distilled spirits is frightfully extending. A gentleman who lately stood before the door of a dram-shop in Manchester, counted dram-drinkers entering at the rate of ten per minute, of whom six were females and two of these young girls. The results of observations made in Leeds by different gentlemen, at different dram-shops, are still more alarming. In Scotland, before Temperance Societies commenced their glorious career of reformation, each family was consuming, on an average, ten gallons of distilled spirits annually. It is acknowledged that three-fourths of all the pauperism in our country, four-fifths of all aggravated crime, one half of all madness one half of all sudden deaths, and one fourth of all deaths in persons above twenty years of age are caused by spirituous liquors. Shall benevolence and patriotism sleep on, with such exterminating ruin around them? If an epidemic disease appears in a street of one of our large towns, or aboard a single vessel ; if a case of hydrophobia is recorded by any