George Barrell Cheever: Deacon Giles' distillery (1844)

Consider next the fearful waste of life attendant on the prosecution of this horrid business. Of these five hundred thousand human beingSj between fifty and sixty thousand die every year. Their places are supplied by an unfailing corps, who are passing hourly from the ranks of the so-called temperance drinkers, to the vast body of the intemperate. An immense procession to the grave is thus kept up, whose miserable conscripts are from all families; a stream of diseased and vicious human life, swollen from all classes in society, like the troubled sea, for protracted vice and anguish in this world, and poured annually into an eternal world of ruin! What benevolent mind but must be roused to effort in the view of such a spectacle?

It seems little, after this, to remind your honor of the national and individual pecuniary loss consequent on the successful business of the distillery. The Attorney-General of the United States has stated the annual loss to the Union from the use of ardent spirit to be one hundred millions of dollars. This statement is doubtless much within the truth; and calculations have been made, which show that directly and indirectly the amount lost is from one hundred and fifty to two hundred millions annually. It is more than enough, as computed by Judge Cranch, to buy up all the houses, lands, and slaves, in the United States, every twenty years. Enough, if applied to purposes of public and social improvement, to make this nation the admiration and envy of the world; enough to put every poor family in the United States in an abode of competence and ease; enough to fill the land with school houses, and universities, and churches, and to carry the means of religious instruction and all other knowledge and blessedness into every household.

The waste of money is nothing to the waste of mind; the loss of sound minds in sound bodies; the loss of so many temperate and intelligent mechanics, artisans, farmers, and professional men, who would otherwise go to swell the moral and intellectual power of the nation; the loss of a thousand influences, hitherto swept onwards in a tide of ruin, that might have been a tide of blessing to the world. In all other ways there has never been such a waste of intellect and morals as by this one vice. It has brooded, like a mighty incubus of death, over our whole physical, intellectual, and moral system. The money lost is infinitely worse than if it had been annihilated, or taken from the mint and sunk in the ocean ; for it is expended in the annual production of wretchedness and crime.