o do
every thing in our power to make the community in which we lived
intelligent, virtuous, and happy; and to avoid every thing that would
mar its peace, degrade its character, or stain its purity. My complaint
is, that by the manufacture of ardent spirits you have violated these
obligations. The facilities for obtaining spirits, and the temptations
to their use and abuse, have been thus so multiplied, and brought so
near, that very many who were once kind neighbors and valuable members
of society are ruined, or in different stages of the path to ruin. One
has got as far as an occasional visit to the grog-shop and the bar-room:
another is rarely seen there; but the wretched condition of his house,
barn, and farm, his impatience of confinement at home, and his many
foolish bargains, tell me, in language not to be mistaken, that the worm
which is preying upon the root of his prosperity is the worm of the
still. The frequent visits of the sheriff to the house of another
neighbor, whose family is healthy and industrious; his bitter complaints
of the hardness of the times; his constant efforts to borrow money to
prevent executions from being levied; the mortgaging of his farm to the
bank; his pimpled face, and bloated body, and dry hacking cough, are
painful testimonies of his familiarity with the products of the
distillery. It is distressing to look around upon our once happy
neighborhood--did you ever do it?--and to see what havoc your
manufactory of spirits has made upon the peace, property, reputation,
intelligence, morality, and good order of the community. No wasting
sickness, no foreign or domestic war, no premature frost; no drought,
blasting, or mildew; nor any other visitation of God; no, not all of
them combined have been the tenth part as fatal to our prosperity and
happiness, as this one self-inflicted curse. And this curse we should
never have felt, had not some of you put into operation your
distilleries, and others fed them with the products of your farms: I
mean, such would have been the happy effect, had the manufacture of
spirits ceased in our land before these evils had followed: and I am now
supposing that some one in every town and neighborhood throughout the
land, where there is a distillery, is addressing the same language to
those who conduct it as I am addressing to you. We make a united and
earnest appeal to you, in view of the ruin that rises around us, that
you would stop the work of destruction