ore labor; when are they
necessary? Why, people in health say, they want to drink them now and
then--they do them good. What good? If they are well, why do they need
them? For nothing but to gratify the taste, and to produce a feeling of
intoxication and derangement, slight in its degree when moderately used,
as they are by such people, but the character of the feeling is no less
certain. It is the same feeling that induces the drunkard to drink. One
man takes a glass to do him good, to make him feel better; another wants
two; another three; another six; and by this time he is intoxicated, and
he never feels well till he is so. He has the same feeling with the man
who drinks a single glass, but more of it; and that man who, in health,
drinks one glass to make him feel better, is just so much of a drunkard;
one-sixth, if it takes six glasses to intoxicate him. He has one-sixth
of the materials of a drunkard in his constitution.

But it is this _moderate use_ of ardent spirits that produces all the
excess. It is this which paves the way to downright and brutal
intoxication. Abolish the ordinary and temperate use of ardent spirits,
and there would not be a drunkard in the country. He who advises men not
to drink to excess, may lop off the branches; he who advises them to
drink only on certain occasions, may fell the trunk; but he who tells
them not to drink at all, strikes and digs deep for the root of the
hideous vice of intemperance; and this is the only course to pursue. It
is this temperate use of ardent spirits that must be discontinued. They
must be no longer necessary when friends call, when we go to the store
to trade, to the tavern to transact business, when we travel the road on
public days--in fact, they must cease to be fashionable and customary
drinks. Do away the fashion and custom that attend their use, and change
the tone of public feeling, so that it will be thought disgraceful to
use them as they are now used by the most temperate and respectable
men, and an end is for ever put to the prevalence of the beastly disease
of intoxication. Let those who cannot be reclaimed from intemperance go
to ruin, and the quicker the better, if you regard only the public good;
but save the rest of our population; save yourselves; save your
children! Raise not up an army of drunkards to supply their places.
Purify your houses. They contain the plague of death; the poison that,
in a few years, will render some of your little