aw higher than public
opinion. What would be the use of the Maine Law in New York? Neal Dow,
the Mayor of Portland, came out with a _posse_ and threw the rum of
the city into the street. From the alms-house a woman came out and
said, "Oh! if this had only been done ten years ago, my husband would
not have died a drunkard, and I would not have been a widow in the
almshouse."

But there are not enough police in the city of New York to stand by
its Mayor in such an undertaking; public opinion is not educated.

I do not know but that God is determined to let drunkards triumph; and
the husbands and sons of thousands of our best families be destroyed
by this vice, in order that our people, amazed and indignant, may rise
up and demand the extermination of this municipal crime.

There is a way of driving down the hoops of a barrel until the hoops
break.

We are in this country, at this time, trying to regulate this evil
by a tax on whiskey. You might as well try to regulate the Asiatic
cholera, or the small-pox, by taxation. The men who distil liquors
are, for the most part, unscrupulous; and the higher the tax, the more
inducement to illicit distillation. New York produces forty thousand
gallons of whiskey every twenty-four hours; and the most of it escapes
the tax. The most vigilant officials fail to discover the cellars, and
vaults, and sheds where this work is done.

Oh, the folly of trying to restrain an evil by government tariffs! If
every gallon of whiskey made, if every flask of wine produced, should
be taxed a thousand dollars, it would not be enough to pay for the
tears it has wrung out of the eyes of widows and orphans, nor for the
blood it has dashed on the altars of the Christian Church, nor for the
catastrophe of the millions it has destroyed forever.

Oh! we are a Christian people! From Boston a ship sailed for
Africa, with three missionaries, and twenty-two thousand gallons
of New-England rum on board. Which will have the most effect: the
missionaries, or the rum?

Rum is victor. Some time when you have leisure, just go down any
of our streets, and count the number of drinking places. Here they
are--first-class hotels. Marble floors. Counter polished. Fine picture
hanging over the decanters. Cut glass. Silver water-coolers. Pictured
punch-bowls. High-priced liquors. Customers pull off their gloves,
and take up the glasses, and click them, and with immaculate
pocket handkerchief wipe their mouth, and go