Page:The dream, or, The true history of Deacon Giles's distillery, and Deacon Jones's brewery.djvu/7



of this remarkable production, seems called for at the present time, when, from many sections of our country, the complaint is heard, that the tide of intemperance, which for a time had been checked, is beginning to rise again, and overflow communities that had been, in a measure, reclaimed from it. For the information of the reader, some account of its origin, is here prefixed, which we extract from a "History," prepared for a former Edition, by Rev. John Marsh, D. D., Corresponding Secretary of the American Temperance Union. "The Rev. was at this time a young minister in Salem, Mass. He had commenced his ministry with an uncompromising spirit toward whatever hindered the spread of the Gospel kingdom. He often passed those murky establishments where, day and night, Sabbath and week days, the lurid fires were burning, and the horrid machinery was in motion. From four distilleries there, no less than six hundred thousand gallons of ardent spirits were annually poured forth; through whose instrumentality, it was believed, a thousand individuals were reduced to pauperism, and four hundred were sent to the drunkard's grave. Of three thousand persons admitted to the work-house within a few minutes' walk of his study, two thousand nine hundred were brought there, directly or indirectly, through intemperance. Over these evils, and an untold corruption of public sentiment, desecration of the Sabbath, and ruin of souls connected with them, lie could not sleep. And if he slept he dreamed. He dreamed "a dream, which was not all a dream."

Upon its appearance in the Salem Landmark, of February, 1835, the public excitement was tremendous. Every distiller and importer, every vender and moderate drinker, almost the entire community, believing that what was legally right, must yet be respected and honored, how horrid soever might be its moral results, cried out against it as an outrage upon society. "With one accord, they rushed to the halls of justice for protection.—Among the four distilleries of the place, one was singled out as answering more directly to the description; and the proprietor, himself a Deacon of a Christian Church, and a man of unexceptionable character, feeling aggrieved and injured in his person and property, a prosecution was commenced by the Commonwealth for a libel. Mr. Cheever pleaded not guilty to the charge, solemnly averring that it was never written or intended as an attack upon any individual; the object of the piece was to portray, in as forcible a light as possible, through the medium of the fiction he had conceived, the real nature and consequences of the manufacture of ardent spirits.