How would you like to have your neighbors one after another break down your fences, and turn their cattle into your corn-fields, cut down your fruit and ornamental trees, set your house or barn on fire, and threaten you with poverty and slavery? If you would not have your neighbor do thus to you, provided he had the power, then how can you, by preparing the food for intemperance, subject the property, the peace, the morality, the religion, and the liberties of your country to those dangers and fearful depredations which you are now inflicting upon her?
How would you like to have your neighbors, directly or indirectly, but unnecessarily, cause the premature death of every fortieth of your children and friends, and of one in three of those above the age of twenty? I know you would not that they should do thus to you, and yet your manufacture of spirits causes the premature death of five hundred of your fellow-citizens every week; in other words, about that number die every week through the intemperance produced by your distilleries.
Again, I ask the men whom I am addressing, how they reconcile their manufacture and sale of spirits with another command of the Bible? _Woe unto him that giveth his neighbor drink, that puttest thy bottle to him, and makest him drunken also, that thou mayest look on their nakedness._ True, this applies most emphatically to the retailer of spirits: but what could the retailer do if there were no distillery; and what could the distiller do if the farmer withheld the materials? All these men are engaged, directly or indirectly, in giving their neighbors drink; and though it may pass through many hands before it reaches all their mouths, yet where must the burden of the guilt rest, if not upon those who stand at the head of the series, and first convert the articles which God has given to nourish and sustain life into active poison for its destruction; and then, for the sake of a paltry pecuniary profit, send it round amongst their neighbors, accompanied with all the plagues that issued from the fabled Pandora's box?
Finally, let me ask these men how the business of preparing ardent spirits for the community appears to them when they think most seriously of another world? In the hours of sober reflection, on the Sabbath, during seasons of devotion, when sickness overtakes you, and death seems near, or you stand by the dying-bed of some one of your family or neighbors; at such seasons can you look back upon this pursuit with pleasure? If conscience then tells you that this business ought to be given up, Oh remember, that conscience is an honest and faithful friend at such times, and that, as this pursuit then appears to you, so will it appear when you come actually to die. Test this business, I beseech you, by bringing it in imagination to the scrutiny of your dying hour. Whether it be lawful or unlawful, certain it is that it sends five hundred drunkards into eternity every week; and you have the express testimony of the Bible, that no drunkard shall inherit the kingdom of God. As the Bible is true, then, are not the manufacturers of ardent spirits in our land the means of sending five hundred souls to hell every week? Tell me, my friends, how will this awful truth appear to you on the bed of death? And how does it appear when you look forward to the final judgment, and realize that you must meet there fifty or an hundred, or five hundred times five hundred drunkards, made such through your instrumentality, for one, or two, or ten years, and must there justify yourselves for this instrumentality, or go away with them into perdition, covered with their blood and followed by their execrations?