it has been found to be not only useless, but fearfully
destructive; so that the guilt of manufacturing it is now enormously
aggravated.

Good men were once engaged in importing slaves. They suspected not the
iniquity of the business; and an apology can be offered for them, on the
ground of ignorance. But their trade has now come to be regarded by the
civilized world in the same odious light as piracy and murder. The man
who engages in it is stamped with everlasting infamy. And the reason is,
that, like the distiller, he now sins amid that fulness of light which
an age of philanthropy has poured around him.

6. Perseverance in the business of distilling _must necessarily be at
the expense of your own reputation and that of your posterity_. You are
creating and sending out the materials of discord, crime, poverty,
disease, and intellectual and moral degradation. You are contributing to
perpetuate one of the sorest scourges of our world. And the scourge can
never be removed till those deadly fires you have kindled are all put
out. That public sentiment which is worthy of respect calls upon you to
extinguish them. And the note of remonstrance will wax louder and
louder till every smoking distillery in the land is demolished. A free
and enlightened people cannot quietly look on while an enemy is working
his engines and forging the instruments of national bondage and death.

Without a prophet's vision, I foresee the day when the manufacture of
intoxicating liquor, for common distribution, will be classed with the
arts of counterfeiting and forgery, and the maintenance of houses for
midnight revelry and corruption. Like these, the business will become a
work only of darkness, and be prosecuted only by the outlaw.

Weigh well, then, the bearing of your destructive employment on personal
and family _character_. The employment may secure for you a little gain,
and perhaps wealth. But, in a day of increasing light and purity, you
can never rid treasures, thus acquired, of a _stigma_, which will render
him miserably poor who holds them. Upon the dwelling you occupy, upon
the fields you enclose, upon the spot that entombs your ashes, there
will be fixed an indescribable gloom and odiousness, to offend the eye
and sicken the heart of a virtuous community, till your memory shall
perish. Quit, then, this vile business, and spare your name, spare your
family, spare your children's children such insupportable shame and
reproach.

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