and no spirit-seller would put on his sign-board,
"The drunkard's spirit-shop." Again, he would put it to men's
consciences to answer, who give respectability and permanence to all the
_treatings_ and other customs by which each successive generation of
drunkards is trained? There was no getting over the undeniable fact,
that moderate spirit-drinkers must bear the responsibility of all this;
and the more the matter was canvassed, the more clearly was it seen,
that the only way in which drunkenness can be put down is the very way
which Jamie and the Temperance Society proposed--_the union of the
temperate in refraining from intoxicating drinks, and promoting
temperance_.

To _parents_ Jamie addressed himself with unwearied and anxious
importunity. Would you object, he would say to them, when other
arguments had failed--would you object to your son becoming a member
when going away from you to live, perhaps, amidst the temptations of a
large town? Would you be afraid, lest keeping him away from the
temptations of the bottle would make him an easier prey to the
solicitations of the strange woman, whose house is the way to death, and
whose steps take hold on hell? He met with none, whether spirit-sellers
or spirit-drinkers, who were able to resist this appeal; and from this,
as well as other causes, the young formed a large and zealous portion of
Jamie's Society. The young he was particularly anxious to enlist in his
cause, not merely because youth is the time of truth, and of open, warm
hearts, and in an especial manner God's time, but because he believed
spirit-drinking parents to be the great agents in making their children
drunkards.

A case which happened in his own neighborhood, gave him a melancholy
confirmation of this opinion. A respectable moderate drinker, who only
now and then exceeded his single tumbler of punch, had seven daughters,
whom he was in the habit of treating to a little glass of punch each day
after dinner. He, of course, considered it good, and they were soon
taught to consider it so too. They began first to like their one glass;
then they began to like two glasses much better; one glass called for
another, till, in the end, they found, according to the adage, that
though one glass of spirits is too much for any one, two glasses are
quite too little. Right onward they went to drunkenness and crime; for,
alas, it was too true in their case, as in all others, that any one may
be ruined who can be