pleasures of drunkenness are quickly at an end, its
pains are of longer continuance. These liquors not only infatuate the
mind, but poison the body; nor do they produce only momentary fury,
but incurable debility and lingering diseases; they not only fill our
streets with madmen, and our prisons with criminals, but our hospitals
with cripples. Those who have for a time infested the publick walks
with their insults, quickly disturb them with their lamentations, and
are soon reduced from bullies to beggars, and obliged to solicit alms
from those they used to threaten and insult.

Nor does the use of spirits, my lords, only impoverish the publick, by
lessening the number of useful and laborious hands, but by cutting off
those recruits by which its natural and inevitable losses are to be
supplied. The use of distilled liquors impairs the fecundity of the
human race, and hinders that increase which providence has ordained
for the support of the world. Those women who riot in this poisonous
debauchery are quickly disabled from bearing children, by bringing on
themselves, in a short time, all the infirmities and weaknesses of
age; or, what is yet more destructive to general happiness, produce
children diseased from their birth by the vices of their parents,
children whose blood is tainted with inveterate and accumulated
maladies, for which no cure can be expected;'and who, therefore, are
an additional burden to the community, and must be supported through a
miserable life by that labour which they cannot share, and must be
protected by that community of which they cannot contribute to the
defence.

Thus, my lords, is the great source of power and wealth dried up, the
numbers of the people are every day diminished, and, by consequence,
our armies must be weakened, our trade abandoned, and our lands
uncultivated. To diminish the people of any nation is the most
atrocious political crime that it is possible to commit; for it tends
not to enslave or impoverish, but to annihilate; not to make a nation
miserable, but to make it no longer a nation.

Such, my lords, are the effects of distilled liquors; effects of which
I would not have shocked you with the enumeration, had it not been
with a design of preventing them; and surely no man will be charged
with so trivial an offence as negligence of delicacy, when he is
pleading, not for the honour or the life of a single man, but for the
peace of the present age, the health of poster