l you a license to
keep a gambling-house, or a brothel, would you purchase such a license,
and present it as a salvo to your conscience?

RETAILER. I tell you once more, there is no use in trying to answer your
questions; for say what I will, you have the art of turning every thing
against me. It was not always so, as you must very distinctly remember.
Formerly I could retail hogshead after hogshead of all kinds of spirits,
and you slept as quietly as a child. But since you began to read these
Reports and Tracts about drinking, and to attend Temperance meetings, I
have scarcely had an hour's peace of my life. I feared that something
like this would be the effect upon your nervous temperament, when you
began; and you may recollect that I strongly objected to your troubling
yourself with these new speculations. It now grieves me to think that I
ever yielded to your importunity; and beware that you do not push me to
extremities in this matter, for I have about come to the resolution
that I will have no more of these mischievous pamphlets, either about
my store or tavern; and that your temperance agents may declaim to the
winds and walls, if they please.

CONSCIENCE. I am amazed at your blindness and obstinacy. It is now from
three to five years since I began to speak--though in a kind of
indistinct undertone at first--against this bloody traffic. I have
reasoned, I have remonstrated, and latterly I have threatened and
implored with increasing earnestness. At times you have listened, and
been convinced that the course which you are pursuing, in this day of
light, is infamous, and utterly inconsistent with a Christian
profession; but before your convictions and resolutions have time to
ripen into action, the love of _money_ regains its ascendency: and thus
have you gone on _resolving, and relapsing, and re-resolving_--one hour
at the preparatory lecture, and the next unloading whiskey at your door;
one moment mourning over the prevalence of intemperance, and the next
arranging your decanters to entice the simple; one day partaking of the
cup of the Lord at his table, and the next offering the cup of devils to
your neighbors; one day singing,

"All that I have, and all I am,
I consecrate to Thee,"

and the next, _for the sake of a little gain_, sacrificing your
character, and polluting all you can induce to drink! O, how can I hold
my peace? How can I let you alone? If you will persist, your blood, and
the blood