George Barrell Cheever: Deacon Giles' distillery (1844)

Of the crime and pauperism connected with intemperance, and sustained by the business of the distillery, T may state that out of 25,767 individuals found in the poor-houses and jails in the city of New York in a single year, 21,558 were brought there directly or indirectly from intemperance. Estimating the people of New York at one-seventh of the population in this country, we bare in the United States 148,799 criminals and paupers made such by the use of ardent spirit. Justice Cole of Albany states that 2500 persons came under his cognizance in a year, and that ninety-six in a hundred of the offences directly or indirectly originated in intemperance. He examined particularly into every case that came before him in one week, and forty-eight cases out of fifty were from intemperance. In the opinion of Judge Whiteman, seven-tenths of all the crime brought before the police court of the city of Boston in eleven years, are to be attributed to intemperance. The number of cases which he tried himself, directly or indirectly to be attributed to this cause, was five thousand six hundred and sixtyone. The judgment of legal men has always coincided with respect to the prevalence of crime through intemperance. Sir Matthew Hale, Lord Chief Justice of England, said two hundred years ago, that if the murders, manslaughters, burglaries, robberies, riots, tumults, and other great enormities, that have happened during the twenty years, were divided into five parts, four have resulted from excessive drinking.

Now, let me ask, Where rests the responsibility of this fearful accumulation of death and crime 1 It cannot be doubted that it rests upon those who make and sell ardent spirit; for they know that that is the agent by which all this misery is produced. They know its destructive tendencies; they know that it is rank poison, in the class of narcotic, vegetable poisons, as sheer poison as henbane; they know that it kills the body and kills the soul. They cannot help knowing it; amidst all the light poured upon this subject, there is not a dram-seller nor a distiller in the land but knows it.

The annual consumption of ardent spirit in the United Slates is at the least calculation fifty-eight millions of gallons. There is a reasonable certainty that for every thirteen hundred gallons made and sold, one human being is destroyed, and that every four hundred and eightythree gallons made and sold prepares a fellow-creature for the prison or the poor-house. The makers and venders of this fiery poison are therefore the direct instruments in filling ihe land with its paupers and criminals, and furnishing for the grave its conscriptions of fifty thousand annual victims. And to all the evils produced by the consumption of ardent spirit, they are knowingly accessory.

It is argued that they are not responsible for the abuse of this poison, and that it is no more immoral to manufacture rum than it is to make gunpowder. But they are responsible for the use of it, knowing, as they do, that that is to make drunkards. They know that the way in which it will be used is to produce intoxication; and if they knew the same of gunpowder, it would be just as immoral to make that. The very idea of success in their business goes upon the supposition that men will use it intemperately. If they used it as not abusing it, they would not use it at all; for it is a deadly poison, whose effects are not good, but only evil continually. To use it as a drink is to abuse it. If they used it as not abusing it, there would neither be a rum-distillery nor a dram-shop in the land. The distillery and the dram-shop are built upon men's graves. The stone out of the foundation, and the beam out of the wall, declare it. Death is their life, human misery their happiness.