res, or exalt their
pleasures, with wine, has banished from their banquets that useful
opponent of troublesome reflection, and doomed all those who receive
his law, not to sobriety only, but to abstinence.

The authority of this man, my lords, cannot indeed be urged as
unexceptionable and decisive; but the reception of his imposture shows
at least, that he was not unacquainted with human nature, and that he
knew how to adapt his forgeries to the nations among which he vented
them; nor can it be denied, but the prohibition of wine was found
generally useful, since it obtained so ready a compliance.

All nations in the world, my lords, in every age of which there remain
any historical accounts, have agreed in the necessity of laying
restraint upon appetite, and setting bounds to the wantonness of
luxury; every legislature has claimed and practised the right of
withholding those pleasures which the people have appeared inclined to
use to excess, and preferring the safety of multitudes whom liberty
would destroy, to the convenience of those who would have enjoyed it
within the limits of reason and of virtue.

The welfare of the publick, my lords, has always been allowed the
supreme law; and when any governours sacrifice the general good either
to private views, or temporary convenience, they deviate at once from
integrity and policy, they betray their trust, and neglect their
interest.

The prohibition of those commodities which are instrumental to vice,
is not only dictated by policy but nature; nor does it, indeed,
require much sagacity, when the evil is known, to find the proper
remedy; for even the Indians, who have not yet reduced the art of
government to a science, nor learned to make long harangues upon the
different interests of foreign powers, the necessity of raising
supplies or the importance and extent of manufactures, have yet been
able to discover, that distilled spirits are pernicious to society,
and that the use of them can only be hindered by prohibiting the sale.

For this reason, my lords, they have petitioned, that none of this
delicious poison should be imported from. Britain; they have desired
us to confine this fountain of wickedness and misery to stream in our
own country, without pouring upon them those inundations of
debauchery, by which we are ourselves overflowed.

When we may be sent with justice to learn from the rude and ignorant
Indians the first elements of civil wisdom, we have surel