George Barrell Cheever: Deacon Giles' distillery (1844)

It is a fundamental principle of society, that every man's business shall be one of benefits given for profits gained. The whole manufacturing, trading, and mercantile community, is a community of barter and exchange of valuable commodities. But the profits of the distiller are derived solely from the destruction of his neighbor's substance. He is a poisonous leech upon the vitals of society. He takes away the livelihood of families, and barters in return what can not only never minister to their subsistence, but is the certain instrument of pauperism and wo. He offers what is not only destitute of all value, but absolutely noxious ; and for the evil given, wrings its hardgotten wages from the hand of penury. For the earnings of the daily laborer he gives in return what weakens his energies, makes his labor every day less productive, and turns him to a ferocious brute. His wealth is the spoil of the community; his distillery a vast machinery of exhaustion playing at the vitals of human society. The pirate, who fills his own ship with the spoil of other ships burned and crews murdered; the slave-trader on the coast of Africa, whose cargo is living human misery on the sea, and misery in desolated households on the shore ; is not, in my opinion, a greater enemy to his race than such an individual; whose whole business, uninterrupted at any time, is bargaining in broken hearts, diseased constitutions, domestic anguish, private misery, public crimes, death to the body, and ruin everlasting to the soul. ,

I may be persecuted for proclaiming the truth, but my lips shall not be silent on the enormity of this traffic. I may be beaten in the streets, abused in the newspapers, insulted by the drunkards, and prosecuted in the law ; but, while I live, I will continue to rebuke this sin. I should be a traitor to my Master, and a shame to my profession, if I did not. In the very community where I am stationed, amidst a population of only fourteen thousand, four distilleries are perpetually plying their trade of death. They do more to corrupt public opinion, perpetuate immorality, paralyze the gospel, and destroy the soul, than all other causes. Of three thousand persons admitted to the workhouse in Salem, two thousand and nine hundred were brought there directly or indirectly by intemperance. The amount of ardent spirit manufactured annually by these four distilleries is probably more than six hundred thousand gallons, through the instrumentality of which there is reason to believe that at least a thousand individuals are reduced to pauperism, and four hundred human beings driven to the drunkard's grave and the drunkard's eternity.