pirits. 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 co