Retailer. But have you forgotten, my good Conscience, that in retailing spirit, I am under the immediate eye and sanction of the laws. Mine is no contraband traffic, as you very well know. I hold a license from the rulers and fathers of the state, and have paid my money for it into the public treasury. Why do they continue to grant and sell licenses, if it is wrong for me to sell rum?
Conscience. Another hard question, which I leave them to answer as best they can. It is said, however, that public bodies have no soul, and if they have no soul, it is difficult to see how they can have any conscience; and if not, what should hinder them from selling licenses? But suppose the civil authorities should offer to sell 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 of those whom you thus entice and destroy, be upon your own head. Whether you will hear, or whether you will forbear, I shall not cease to remonstrate; and when I can do no more to reclaim you, I will sit down at your gate, in the bitterness of despair, and cry, Murder! Murder!! MURDER!!!
Retailer. (Pale and trembling.) “Go thy way for this time; when I have a convenient season, I will call for thee.”