George Barrell Cheever: Deacon Giles' distillery (1844)

Compare it with other supposable employments, which no one would excuse for a moment, but would place upon them at once the brand of infamy. If a man should invent a preparation of arsenic so seductive, that men might be found in multitudes mad enough to buy and swallow it, as they do opium in Turkey, and should set up an extensive manufactory, to supply immense quantities to the whole United States, murdering, by a slow but dreadful death, multitudes in every year, what would the community think of such a man? Would it be possible to libel his occupation 1 If the milkmen in one of our large cities should mingle arsenic in their canisters, or if our bakers should invent such a poisonous preparation to increase the sale of their bread, or if our butchers should send their meat to market with a poisonous and alluring preparation, so as to make our daily food our rapid destruction;—would wealth, or respectability, or family connexions, shield these men from publio indignation 1 If a minister of the gospel should expose the iniquity, would he be accused of stepping out of the line of his profession, or. do you think that the tide of public odium could be set against the exposer and made to shield the sin 1 Do you imagine that an assault upon his person in the street, and a prosecution against him for libel, could be supported? And yet I may challenge any man to prove that the business of distilling is not more injurious to society, a more fatal outrage upon all its interests, than either of the practices to which I have now referred. There is this radical defect in all attempted illustrations of the immorality of the traffic in ardent spirits, that in respect to the wo brought upon the undying soul in eternity, they fall infinitely beneath the true delineation of its guilt.

There is another view of some importance. Let it be remembered that the distillery is doing more than all other agents to destroy the power of those moral and religious truths, on which the whole wellbeing of our country depends. You will always notice that infidelity, atheism, and the denial of the fundamental spiritual truths of the Bible, go hand in hand with the use of ardent spirit. It is a firm conviction in the minds of all enlightened men that our institutions cannot be supported, but by the prevalence of those truths. To that prevalence every distillery is an opposed barrier of incalculable power. Under the protection of law, it is*an established church of anarchy, infidelity, atheism, blasphemy, and lust. Let its business prevail, and we shall have no government but anarchy, no law but mob-law, no religion but licentiousness. Its direct and perpetual tendency is to break up the foundations of social order, defy the selfish principle, make every man's private will supreme, and bury all venerable institutions in the great devouring deep of human passion.

Yet this business, diametrically opposed to the very object for which the social compact is established, and whose only operation is injury to the community in every possible way, must not be attacked, because it is protected by law! The sober-minded and industrious may be injured by it continually, but there is no appeal. If my neighbor injures my property, the law gives me justice. He may manufacture in his distillery, and keep in his store, and distribute through the community, that which endangers, by placing temptation directly in the way, the temporal and eternal welfare of my whole family, and is sure to spread disgrace, ruin, and death, wherever he sends it; and from such a disturber of the peace there is no protection, no relief. On the contrary, the business of death is legalized, and through its instrumentality more than a hundred millions of dollars are annually expended in the production of poverty, disease, and crime, and the graves are opened for fifty thousand human beings. A manufactory where war could be produced annually with every European nation in succession would not be more anti-christian and contradictory to the first principles of human society.