At the lowest calculation, it has annually despoiled us of a hundred millions of dollars—of thirty millions for an article which is nothing worth, and seventy or eighty millions more to compensate for the mischiefs that article has done—money enough to accomplish all that the warmest patriot could wish for his country, and to fill, in a short period, the world with Bibles and a preached Gospel. What farmer would not be roused, should a wild beast come once a year into his borders and destroy the best cow in his farmyard? But 61/4 cents a day for ardent spirit wastes $22 81 cents a year, and in 40 years nearly $1,000, which is a thousand times as much as scores of drunkards are worth at their burial.
See the pauperism it has produced. We have sung of our goodly heritage, and foreign nations have disgorged their exuberant population that they might freely subsist in this land of plenty. But in this granary of the world are everywhere seen houses without windows, fields without tillage, barns without roofs, children without clothing, and penitentiaries and almshouses filled to overflowing; and a traveller might write—beggars made here. We are groaning under our pauperism, and talking of taxes, and hard times, and no trade; but intemperance has stalked through our land and devoured our substance. It has entered the houses of our unsuspecting inhabitants as a friend, and taken the food from their tables, and the clothing from their beds, and the fuel from their fire, and turned their lands over to others, and drove them from their dwellings to subsist on beggary and crime, or drag out a miserable existence in penitentiaries and almshouses. Two-thirds, or 150,000 of the wretched tenants of these abodes of poverty in the United States, were reduced by intemperance. So themselves confess. It was rum, brandy, and whiskey, that did it. And the Prison Discipline report tells of 50,000 cases of imprisonment for debt annually in the United States, in consequence of the use of ardent spirits. O, its sweeps of property can never be known.
Look at the crime it has occasioned.
It is said that there is a spring in China which makes every man that drinks it a villain. Eastern tales are founded on some plain matter of fact. This spring may be some distillery or dram-shop; for this is the natural effect of alcohol. It breaks down the conscience, quickens the circulation, increases the courage, makes man flout at law and right, and hurries him to the perpetration of every abomination and crime. Excite a man by this fluid, and he is bad enough for any thing. He can lie, and steal, and fight, and swear, and plunge the dagger into the bosom of his nearest friend. No vice is too filthy, no crime too tragical for the drunkard. The records of our courts tell of acts committed under the influence of rum, which curdle the blood in our veins. Husbands butcher their wives; children slaughter their parents. Far the greater part of the atrocities committed in our land, proceed from its maddening power. “I declare in this public manner, and with the most solemn regard to truth,” said Judge Rush, some years ago in a charge to a grand jury, “that I do not recollect an instance since my being concerned in the administration of justice, of a single person being put on his trial for manslaughter which did not originate in drunkenness; and but few instances of trial for murder where the crime did not spring from the same unhappy cause.” Of 895 complaints presented to the police court in Boston in one year, 400 were under the statute against common drunkards. Of 1,061 cases of criminal prosecution in a court in North Carolina, more than 800 proceeded from intemperance. Five thousand complaints are made yearly in New York to the city police of outrages committed by intoxicated persons; and the late city attorney reports, that of twenty-two cases of murder which it had been his duty to examine, every one of them had been committed in consequence of intemperate drinking. “Nine-tenths of all the prisoners under my care,” says Captain Pillsbury, warden of our own state prison, “are decidedly intemperate men, and were brought to their present condition, directly or indirectly, through intoxicating liquor. Many have confessed to me with tears, that they never felt tempted to the commission of crime, thus punishable, but when under the influence of strong drink.” And the Prison Discipline report states, “that of 125,000 criminals committed to our prisons in a single year, 93,750 were excited to their commission of crime by spirituous liquors.”
Look at its destruction of intellect.
It reduces man to a beast, to a fool, to a devil. The excessive drinker first becomes stupid, then idiotic, then a maniac. Men of the finest geniuses, most acute minds, and profound learning, have dwindled under the touch of this withering demon to the merest insignificance, and been hooted by boys for their silly speeches and silly actions, or chained in a madhouse as unsafe in society. Of eighty-seven admitted into the New York hospital in one year, the insanity of twenty-seven was occasioned by ardent spirit; and the physicians of the Pennsylvania hospital report, that one-third of the insane of that institution were ruined by intemperance. What if one-sixth of our maniacs were deprived of their reason by the bite of the dogs, the friendly inmates of our houses, or by some vegetable common on our table; who would harbor the dangerous animal, or taste the poisonous vegetable? But, one-third of our maniacs are deranged by alcohol. Indeed, every drunkard is in a temporary delirium; and no man who takes even a little into his system, possesses that sound judgment, or is capable of that patient investigation or intellectual effort, which would be his without it. Just in proportion as man comes under its influence, he approximates to idiotism or madness.
Look at its waste of health and life.
The worm of the still, says the Missouri gentleman, never touches the brute creation, but as if the most venomous of all beings, it seizes the noblest prey. It bites man. And where it once leaves its subtle poison, farewell to health—farewell to long life. The door is open, and in rush dyspepsia, jaundice, dropsy, gout, obstructions of the liver, epilepsy—the deadliest plagues let loose on fallen man—all terminating in delirium tremens or mania a potu, a prelude to the eternal buffetings of foul spirits in the world of despair. One out of every forty, or three hundred thousand of our population, have taken up their abode in the lazar-house of drunkenness, and thirty thousand die annually the death of the drunkard. These sweeps of death mock all the ravages of war, famine, pestilence, and shipwreck. The yellow-fever in Philadelphia, in 1793, felt to be one of the greatest curses of heaven, destroyed but four thousand. In our last war the sword devoured but five hundred a year: intemperance destroys two hundred a week. Shipwrecks destroy suddenly, and the country groans when forty or fifty human beings are suddenly engulfed in the ocean; but more than half of all the sudden deaths occur in fits of intoxication. It needed not a fable to award the prize of greatest ingenuity in malice and murder to the demon who invented brandy, over the demon who invented war.
Look at its murder of souls.
Not satisfied with filling jails, and hospitals, and graveyards, it must people hell. Every moral and religious principle is dissipated before it. The heart becomes, under its influence, harder than the nether mill-stone. It has gone into the pulpit and made a Judas of the minister of Christ. It has insinuated itself into the church, and bred putrefaction and death among the holy. It has entered the anxious room in seasons of revival, and quenched conviction in the breast of the distressed sinner, or sent him, exhilarated with a false hope, to profess religion, and be a curse to the church. It has accompanied men, Sabbath after Sabbath, to the house of God, and made them insensible as blocks of marble to all the thunders of Sinai and sweet strains of Zion. It has led to lying, profane swearing, Sabbath-breaking, tale-bearing, contention; and raised up an army, I may almost say, in every village, who wish for no Sabbath, and no Bible, and no Saviour, and who cry out with stammering tongues, “Away with him, crucify him.” It has, without doubt, been the most potent of all the emissaries of Satan, to obliterate the fear of the Lord, turn men away from the Sabbath and the sanctuary, steel them against the word, the providence, and grace of God, stupefy the conscience, bring into action every dark and vile passion, and fill up with immortal souls the dark caverns of eternal night. Let a man, day by day, hover around a dram-shop, and sip and sip at his bottle, and the devil is sure of him. No ministers, no Sabbaths, no prayers, no tears from broken-hearted and bleeding relatives, can avail to save him. He holds that man by a chain which nothing but Omnipotence can break.