Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/55

Rh science. I know well enough what is sin; God, only, who is a sinner. Yet I cannot think tho poor man who retails half so bad as tho rich mail who distils, imports or sells by wholesale the infamous drug. He know bettor, and cannot plead poverty as the excuse of his crime. Let me mention some of the statistics of this trade before I speak of its effects. If there are one thousand drink-shops, and each sells liquor to tho amount of only six dollars a day, which is the price of only one hundred drams, or two hundred at tho lowest shops, then we have tho sum of #2,190,000 paid for liquor to be drunk on the spot every year. This sum is considerably more than double the amount paid for the whole public education of the people in the entire State of Massachusetts! In Boston alone, last year, there were distilled, 2,873,623 gallons of spirit. In five years, from 1840 to 1845, Boston exported 2,156,990, and imported 2,887,993 gallons. They burnt up a man the other day, at the distillery in Merrimack-street. You road tho story in the daily papers, and remember how the bystanders looked on with horror to see the wounded man attempting with his hands to fend off the flames from his naked head ! Great Heaven! It was not the first man that distillery has burnt up! No, not by thousands. You see men about your streets, all on fire; some half-burnt down; some withall the soul burnt out, only the cinders left of the man, the shell and wall, and that, tumbling and tottering, ready to fell. Who of you has not lost a relative, at least a friend, in that withering flame, that terrible auto-da-fe, that hell-fire on earth?

Let us look away from that. I wish we could look on something to efface that ghastly sight. But see the results of this trade. Do you wonder at the poverty just now spoken of; at the vagrant children? In the poor-house at Albany, at one time, there were 633 persona, and of them 615 were intemperate! Ask your city authorities how many of the poor are brought to their almshouse directly or remotely by intemperance! Do you wonder at the crime which fills your gaols, and swells the tax of county and city? Three-fourths of the petty crime in the State comes from this source directly or remotely. Your gaols were never so Ml before J When the parents are there, what is left for the children P In Prussia, the Govern-