-ROOM.

CONSCIENCE. (Looking over the ledger with a serious air.) What is that
last invoice from the West Indies?

RUM-DEALER. Only a few casks of fourth proof, for particular customers.

CONSCIENCE. And that domestic poison, via New Orleans; and on the next
page, that large consignment, via Erie Canal?

DEALER. O, nothing but two small lots of prime whiskey, such as we have
been selling these twenty years. But why these chiding inquiries? They
disquiet me exceedingly. And to tell you the plain truth, I am more than
half offended at this morbid inquisitiveness.

CONSCIENCE. Ah, I am afraid, as I have often told you, that this is a
bad business; and the more I think of it, the more it troubles me.

DEALER. Why so? You are always preaching up industry as a Christian
virtue, and my word for it, were I to neglect my business, and saunter
about the hotels and steamboat wharves, as some do, you would fall into
convulsions, as if I had committed the unpardonable sin.

CONSCIENCE. Such pettish quibbling is utterly unworthy of your good
sense and ordinary candor. You know, as well as I do, the great
difference between industry in some safe and honest calling, and driving
a business which carries poverty and ruin to thousands of families.

DEALER. _Honest_ industry! This is more cruel still. You have known me
too long to throw out such insinuations; and besides, it is notorious,
that some of the first merchants in our city are engaged, far more
extensively, in the same traffic.

CONSCIENCE. Be it so. "To their own Master they stand or fall." But if
fair dealing consists in "doing as we would be done by," how can a man
of your established mercantile and Christian reputation sustain himself,
if he continues to deal in an article which he knows to be more
destructive than all the plagues of Egypt?

DEALER. Do you intend, then, to make me answerable for all the mischief
that is done by ardent spirit, in the whole state and nation? What I
sell is a mere drop of the bucket, compared with the consumption of a
single county. Where is the proof that the little which my respectable
customers carry into the country, with their other groceries, ever does
any harm? How do you know that it helps to make such a frightful host of
drunkards and vagabonds? And if it did, whose fault would it be? I never
gave nor sold a glass of whiskey to a tippler in my life. Let those who
will drink to excess, and make brutes of themselves, answer for