George Barrell Cheever: Deacon Giles' distillery (1844)

Is the traffic in rum an immorality in the dram-shop, but a reputable business in the distillery? Or is the history of any distillery so sacred, that the arm of the law shall be laid upon any individual who presumes to delineate one of its pages? Or does the profession of religion, or the title of an office in the church, invest any man's employment in the world with such sacredness, that even the light of truth must preserve a reverential distance, nor illuminate its awful precincts with too near an approach? I know that " they who have used the office of a deacon well, purchase to themselves a good de free, and great boldness in the faith which is in Christ Jesus." Put read nowhere, in history sacred or profane, that it purchases the privilege of boldly making rum, with an exemption from the scorn that is its inevitable attendant. The dram-drinking, dram-selKng, dram-manufacturing deacons are, surely, with great justice, the butt and ridicule of the community; for the inconsistency is monstrous; nor ought the sin of any man's employment to be cloaked by the sanctity of any man's profession. Why hesitate to acknowledge that the church, wherever it be, whatever, it be, which sustains such an immorality in its bosom, holds up, in the eye of all the world, its own Christianity to suspicion and disgrace?

That I may not seem to your honor to be dealing in declamation, and that you may have fully before your mind the motives that actuated my efforts, let me here refresh your memory with some of the dreadful statistics dependent on the existence and activity of the distillery. They are statistics of misery, uninterrupted in their recurrence and accumulation, in authenticated estimates, catalogues, and certificates, of the wreck of property and character, and the spread of pauperism, crime, disease, and death. On a calculation taken from one of the most temperate communities, by actual census of the Counties of Wayne and Seneca, and five towns in Cayuga County, in the State of New York, and showing one drunkard to every twenty-seven inhabitants in the fourteen millions of our country, there are at this day more than five hundred thousand drunkards in the United States. Are we startled at the fact? There is nothing speculative in the statement. The returns were made from actual examination, by competent, respectable men, and the particulars of each town were given separately. Does the result seem incredible'? Surely we do not meet an intoxicated wretch in every twenty-seven individuals. We may not meet them in our daily walks and occupations. They are not commonly out in the face of the community, and we well know they are not an active, enterprising race. Their very habits exclude them from the sweet light and the wholesome business of society. Theirs are the abodes of filth and raggedness, the homes that they fill with guilt and anguish. Part people our alms-houses and prisons. Part line our canals, and crowd the hidden, impure, and almost subterranean streets of our cities. They inhabit the dens and caves of civilisation, the pest-haunts of sin, the cellars, and bar-rooms, and grog-shops. There they congregate j there they inflame their passions, and profane the name of God. But on every occasion of brawls and riots, whenever deeds of wickedness are in progress, or the elements of a mob have opportunity and space for combination, then they emerge from their darkness, and your sight is arrested by savage faces, and haggard forms, reeling and reeking from the hot hells, where the stream of the distillery is poured and drank at a thousand fountains.