rk, occurred, that could not be traced to ardent spirit as the cause.
In Philadelphia, ten. This is the legitimate, regular effect of the
business. It tends to poverty, crime, and woe, and greatly to increase
the taxes and burdens of the community.

What is done then in this traffic? You are filling our almshouses, and
jails, and penitentiaries, with victims loathsome and burdensome to the
community. You are engaged in a business which is compelling your
fellow-citizens to pay taxes to support the victims of your employment.
You are filling up these abodes of wretchedness and guilt, and then
asking your fellow-citizens to pay enormous taxes indirectly to support
this traffic. For, if every place where ardent spirits can be obtained,
were closed in this city and its suburbs, how long might your splendid
palaces for the poor be almost untenanted piles; how soon would your
jails disgorge their inmates, and be no more filled; how soon would the
habitations of guilt and infamy in every city become the abodes of
contentment and peace; and how soon would reeling loathsomeness and want
cease to assail your doors with importunate pleadings for charity.

Now we have only to ask our fellow-citizens, what right they have to
pursue an employment tending thus to burden the community with taxes,
and to endanger the dwellings of their fellow-men, and to send to my
door, and to every other man's door, hordes of beggars loathsome to the
sight; or to compel the virtuous to seek out their wives and children,
amidst the squalidness of poverty, and the cold of winter, and the
pinchings of hunger, to supply their wants? Could impartial justice be
done in the world, an end would soon be put to the traffic in ardent
spirits. Were every man bound to alleviate all the wretchedness which
his business creates, to support all the poor which his traffic causes,
an end would soon be made of this employment. But alas, you can diffuse
this poison for gain, and then call on your industrious and virtuous
countrymen to alleviate the wretchedness, to tax themselves to build
granite prisons for the inmates which your business has made; and
splendid palaces, at an enormous expense, to extend a shelter and a home
for those whom your employment has turned from their own habitations. Is
this a moral employment? Would it be well to obtain a living in this way
in any other business?

5. The business is _inconsistent with the law of God_, which requires
us to lov