George Barrell Cheever: Deacon Giles' distillery (1844)

Here we find the vender of ardent spirit pronounced a murderer by a learned judge upon the bench, and as much worse than a common murderer as the soul is better than the body. What shall be said of the distiller 1 The more enlightened, the better educated, and the more respectable he is as a man, the less of the shadow of an excuse he has for continuing to ply this trade of death. He cannot but see that it is the manufacture of misery, and nothing else; that his whole occupation is to make drunkards, and nothing else; that he lives only to fill the country with crime, the jails with prisoners, the hospitals with disease, the alms-house with paupers, time with death, eternity with wo. He knows all this. His station in society is such, that except while amidst the stench and fires of his distillery, he lives and walks amidst the light of truth. His associates are not, like those of the dramseller, the drinkers of his own poison, among whom he might lose all sense of shame, all sensibility to truth; but moral men, among whom perhaps he admires the temperance reformation, provided it be not urged forward with an indiscreet zeal; and converses on the necessity of purifying the public morals, and regenerating public opinion, while his whole life is a perpetual effort to extend the ravages of that agent, by which, more than all other causes, the public morals are corrupted, and public opinion is depraved.

Besides, the distiller is generally wealthy. He must be rich, or he could not well be a distiller. He has not, therefore, even the poor apology so often alleged for continuing in the tralRc, that if he quits it his family must suffer; an apology without foundation for any individual; for were he to shoulder a saw-horse, and saw wood from door to door for his subsistence, he would be a happier and a healthier man, and his family a happier and healthier family. But the manufacturer has grown so rich in this dreadful business, that he could afford to burn down his distillery, and turn all his liquor into the streets, and still possess a competency. He might throw the whole investment into the ocean, and still command ample capital to enter upon any honest livelihood whatever. He is more guilty in continuing this traffic than any dramseller in the land. Yet, while the business of dramselling may be attacked, and the community applaud the exposer, the business of distilling, the source of the whole evil, shall be comparatively shielded; and if a man advert to a fact in the history of a distiller—if he speak bf the monstrous conjunction of rum and Bibles in one and the same manufactory—he shall first be assaulted in the streets, and then be prosecuted for libel; while the men who outraged the law in assaulting him shall be loaded with applauses, and, with one exception, dismissed from court without even the form of trial, atthe discretion of the same public officer who conducts the libel prosecution against the individual already subjected to that violence.