George Barrell Cheever: Deacon Giles' distillery (1844)

Then as to the extrinsic evidence of malice, there is none. In this respect there was an utter failure on the part of the government. They have failed to show external proof of malicious intention. There has not been a particle of proof that looks that way. A former prosecution has been adverted to; but in that neither cause nor proof has been found of malicious feeling. It has not been proved that Deacon Stone ever did me any injury, or that I ever had any cause whatever of malice towards him, or any provocation to illfeeling against him. There is nothing in any part of the evidence that goes to the great point of malice. No words of the defendant, or expressions of unkindness, or manifestations of malice in any way, have been alleged as containing any ground whatever on which to rest that charge. A great occasion for the publication of the article is proved; an exigency in society demanding it, and a motive for its composition on the face of it. But it is not proved that " the defendant used the occasion as a mere color and pretext for venting his malice." Here the extrinsic evidence entirely fails. There is not enough to support judgment against the defendant. Under the protection of the statute such judgment could never have been obtained, unless the jury were charged to bring him in guilty whatever were his motives.

If any man is at a loss for a motive to the publication of the article, let him contemplate for a moment the nature of the traffic in ardent spirits. Let him cast his eye over the vast catalogue of human crime and misery. There are no enormities which the business of distilling does not produce, no extravagances of iniquity to which it does not lead. It is literally the wholesale manufacture of iniquity of every description. It would challenge the ingenuity of mankind to show that it is anything else. 1 stand here accused of crime in attacking a trade which in itself is the production of all crime, and has occasioned more criminal litigation than all other causes. I stand here accused of violating the laws of my country in attacking a business whose direct, inevitable, supreme, and incessant result, is the trampling under foot, and defiance, and destruction of all law and all obligation, human and divine. I am here to answer to a charge of defaming the character, and wantonly and maliciously injuring the peace of families and individuals, in vividly depicting an employment which is nothing but ruin to the character and death to the peace, temporal and eternal, of thousands of families, and hundreds of thousands of individuals. I am arraigned as a criminal at this bar for disturbing the peace of the commonwealth, and the domestic happiness of its households, in attacking a business whose positive, unchangeable operation is to fill the commonwealth with brawls, riots, robberies, and murders, and its households with drunkenness, wrath, poverty, and anguish. You cannot show that the business of distilling is anything else. It tends to break up all social order, prostrate all barriers of law, set fire to all violent human passions, and whelm all institutions of blessedness, domestic, civil, and religious, in one blasting, fiery tide of ruin. It leaves no man's character, no man's property, no man's family, safe. I stand here accused of crime in attacking this infernal traffic, and painting its consequences in colors but too faithful to the life.