Page:The dream, or, The true history of Deacon Giles's distillery, and Deacon Jones's brewery.djvu/9

Rh This statement is doubtless much within the truth: and calculations have been made, which show that directly and indirectly the amount lost is from one hundred and fifty to two hundred millions annually. It is more than enough, as computed by Judge Cranch, to buy up all the houses, lands, and slaves, in the United States every twenty years. "The waste of money is nothing to the waste of mind; the loss of sound minds in sound bodies; the loss of so many temperate and intelligent mechanics, artisans, farmers, and professional men. who would otherwise go to swell the moral and intellectual power ot the nation; the loss of a thousand influences, hitherto swept onwards in a tide of ruin, that might have been a tide of blessing to the world. In all other ways there has never been such a waste of intellect and morals as by this one vice. It has brooded, like a mighty incubus of death, over our whole physical, intellectual, and moral system. The money lost is infinitely worse than if it had been annihilated, or taken from the mint and sunk in the ocean; for it is expended in the annual production of wretchedness and crime.

"Of the crime and pauperism connected with intemperance, and sustained by the business of the distillery, I may state that out of 25,707 individuals found in the poor-houses and jails in the city of New York in a single year, 21,553 were brought there directly or indirectly from intemperance. Estimating the people of New York at one-seventh of the population in this country, we have in the United States, 148,799 criminals and paupers, made such by the use of ardent spirits. "Now, let me ask, Where rests the responsibility of this fearful accumulation of death and crime? It can not be doubted that it rests upon those who make and sell ardent spirits; for they know that that is the agent by which all this misery is produced. They know its destructive tendencies; they know that it is rank poison, in the class of narcotic, vegetable poisons, as sheer poison as henbane; they know that it kills the body and kills the soul They can not help knowing it; amidst all the light poured upon the subject, there is not a dramseller nor a distiller in the land but knows it.

"The distiller is generally wealthy. He must be rich, or he could not well be a distiller. He has not, therefore, even the poor apology, so often alleged for continuing in the traffic, that if he quits it his family must, suffer; an apology without foundation for any individual; for were he to shoulder a sawhorse, and saw wood from door to door for his subsistence, he would be a happier and healthier man, and his family a happier and healthier family. But the manufacturer has grown so rich in this dreadful business, that he could afford to burn down his distillery, and turn all his liquor into the streets, and still possess a competency. He might throw the whole investment into the ocean, and still command ample capital to enter upon any honest livelihood whatever. He is more guilty in continuing this traffic than any dramseller in the land. Yet while the business of dramselliag may be attacked, and the community applaud the exposer, the business of distilling, the source of the whole evil, shall be comparatively shielded; and if a man advers to the fact in the history of a distiller—if he speak of the monstrous conjunction of rum and Bibles in one and the same manufactory—he shall first be assaulted in the streets, and then prosecuted for libel; while the men who outraged the law in assaulting him shall be loaded with applause, and, with one exception, dismissed from, court without even the form of a trial, at the discretion of the same public officer who conducts the libel prosecution against the individual already subjected to that violence.

"I am not willing to believe that your honor will tend your influence to sanction this enormity.—You will see that the respectability of the distiller can with no more propriety shield his occupation from scorn, than that of the dramseller can protect his. He may boast in his veins the blood of all the Howards, or he may have descended from the man who first put a bottle to the lips of his neighbor; his family may be rich and respectable, or poor and degraded; he may be a member of the church, receiving on the Sabbath, the emblems of the body and blood of his Saviour, with the same hands that during the week prepare and circulate the means for his betrayal; or he may be a man excommunicated from the church for persisting in the traffic in ardent spirits: whether he be the one or the other, is to you a matter of entire indifference. You will remember that 'it is just because the sin of intemperance is upheld by the rich and reputable, and by professed Christinas that Temperance Reform drays so heavily.'

"In mitigation of judgment at this time," he said, "I need scarcely remind your honor more particularly of the course taken by the Attorney-General in the discharge of two of the individuals engaged in the assault upon my person, without even the form of trial. Whether it be a greater offence in the judgment of this court to describe a distiller's occupation, as I have done in the Landmark; or with