pense of the sober, and lost
to morality, and industry, and hope; the source of lawsuits, and the
fountain of no small part of the expenses of courts of justice. In the
same group would be no less than 200,000 paupers, in a land abounding in
all the wealth that the richest soil can give, and under all the
facilities which the most favored spot under the whole heaven can
furnish for acquiring a decent and an honest subsistence. Paupers,
supported at the expense of the sober and the industrious, and creating
no small part of our taxes, to pay for their indolence, and
wretchedness, and crimes. And in the same group would be no less than
600 insane persons, made such by intemperance, in all the horrid and
revolting forms of delirium--the conscience destroyed, the mind
obliterated, and hope and happiness fled for ever. And in the same group
there would be no less than 30,000 of our countrymen, who die annually,
as the direct effect of the use of ardent spirit. Thirty thousand of our
countrymen sinking to the most loathsome and dishonored of all graves,
the grave of the drunkard. This is just a summary of the obvious and
sure effects of this vice. The innumerable woes that it incidentally
causes; the weeping and groans of the widow and the fatherless; the
crimes and vices which it tends to introduce into abodes that would, but
for this, be the abodes of peace, are not, and cannot be taken into the
account.

Now, this state of things, if produced in any other way, would spread
weeping and sackcloth over nations and continents. Any sweeping
pestilence that could do this, would hold a nation in alarm, and
diffuse, from one end of it to the other, trembling and horror. The
world has never known any thing else like it. The father of mischief has
never been able to invent any thing that should diffuse more wide-spread
and dreadful evils.

It is agreed further, and well understood, that this is the _regular
effect of the traffic, and manufacture, and use of this article_. It is
not casual, incidental, irregular. It is uniform, certain, deadly, as
the sirocco of the desert, or as the malaria of the Pontine marshes. It
is not a periodical influence, returning at distant intervals; but it is
a pestilence, breathing always--diffusing the poison when men sleep and
when they wake, by day and by night, in seed-time and harvest--attending
the manufacture and sale of the article _always_. The destroyer seeks
his victim alike in every hogsh