The institution of every subordinate auxiliary means of promoting the reformation of all such usages, courtesies, habits and customs of the people, as lead to intemperate habits; more especially the exclusion of ardent spirits from all places where large numbers are congregated either for business or pleasure, and the changing the current opinion of such spirits being wholesome and beneficial (which the frequent practice of our offering them to those whom we wish to please or reward so constantly fosters and prolongs) into the opinion of their being a most pernicious evil, which should on all occasions be avoided, as poisoner of the health, the morals, and the peace of society.
The removal of all taxes on knowledge, and the extending every facility to the widest spread of useful information to the humblest classes of the community.
A national system of education, which should ensure the means of instruction to all ranks and classes of the people, and which, in addition to the various branches of requisite and appropriate knowledge, should embrace, as an essential part of the instruction given by it to every child in the kingdom, accurate information as to the poisonous and invariably deleterious nature of ardent spirits, as an article of diet, in any form or shape; and the inculcation of a sense of shame at the crime of voluntarily destroying, or thoughtlessly obscuring that faculty of reasoning, and that consciousness of responsibility, which chiefly distinguish man from the brute, and which his Almighty Maker, when He created him in His own image, implanted in the human race to cultivate, to improve, and to refine—and not to corrupt, to brutalise, and to destroy.
Ultimate or Prospective Remedies.
The ultimate or prospective remedies which have been strongly urged by several witnesses, and which they think, when public opinion shall be sufficiently awakened to the great national importance of the subject, may be safely recommended, include the following:—
(a) The absolute prohibition of the importation from any foreign country, or from our colonies, of distilled spirits in any shape.
(b) The equally absolute prohibition of all distillation of ardent spirits from grain.
(c) The restriction of distillation from other materials, to the purposes of the arts, manufactures, and medicine, and the confining the wholesale and retail dealing in such articles to chemists, druggists, and dispensaries alone.
Finally they conclude:—