ies and shops may be
traced all the poverty, and contention, and tears, and blood, which
drunkenness produces; that their occupation is to poison the young and
the old; and by dealing out gallons, and quarts, and pints, and gills,
they fill up, with drunkards, the highway to hell; that they do all this
to get the money of the wretched victims; that the tears of
broken-hearted widows and orphan children are entering into the ears of
the Lord of Sabaoth, and that neither God nor their consciences will
hold them guiltless in this thing, and sure I am that they will be
filled with horror at their own doings, and quit their business.

If there are some so hardened and dead to all the best interests of men
as to persist, against the light of the age, in the business of making
drunkards, let public indignation burn against them till they can no
longer stand before its fires. Let a distillery be viewed as a man would
view the inquisition, where the racks, the tortures, and the fires,
consume the innocent. Let the dram-shop be ranked, as Judge Dagget says
it should be, with the haunts of counterfeiters, the depositories of
stolen goods, and the retreats of thieves; and over its door let it be
written, "The way to hell, leading down to the chambers of death." The
time has been when a vender could deal out, day by day, the liquid
poison to the tottering drunkard, attend his funeral, help lay him in
the grave; then go home, post up his books, turn the widow and her babes
into the streets to perish with hunger or be supported by charity, and
yet sustain a good reputation. But in future, whenever the community
shall stand around the grave of a drunkard, let the eyes of all be fixed
on the inhuman vender; let him be called to take one solemn look into
the grave of the slain and the pit of the damned; and if he will return
to the ruin of his fellow-men, let the voice of his brother's blood cry
to him from the ground, and his punishment be greater than he can bear.

Perhaps some reputable vender is offended at the freedom of these
remarks. I would ask him if he has never been offended at the smell of
that filthy drunkard who has hung around him? I would ask him if his
conscience has never stung him as ragged children have come to him in
bleak November to have him fill their father's bottle? I would ask him
if his soul has never shook within him as he passed, in the darkness of
night, the graveyard where three, four, or five of his neigh