"If any man (said Mr. Cheever.) is at a loss for a motive to the publication of the article, let him contemplate for a moment the nature of the traffic in ardent spirits. Let him cast his eyes over the vast catalogue of human crime and misery. There are no enormities which the business of distilling does not produce, no extravagances of iniquity to which it does not lead. It is literally the wholesale manufacturer of iniquity of every description. It would challenge the ingenuity of mankind to show that it is anything else. I stand here accused of crime in attacking a trade which in itself is the production of all crime, and has occasioned more criminal litigation than all other causes. I stand here accused of violating the laws of my country in attacking a business whose direct, inevitable, supreme, and incessant result, is the trampling under foot, and defiance, and destruction of all law and all obligation, human and divine. I am here to answer to a charge of defaming the character, and wantonly and maliciously injuring the peace, of families and individuals, in vividly depicting an employment which is nothing but ruin to the character, and death to the peace, temporal and eternal, of thousands of families, and hundreds of thousands of individuals. I am arraigned as a criminal at this bar for disturbing the peace of the Commonwealth, and the domestic happiness of its households, in attacking a business whose positive, unchangeable operation is to till the Commonwealth with brawls, riots, robberies, murders, and its households with drunkenness, wrath, poverty, and anguish. You can not show that the business of distilling is anything else. It tends to break up all social order, prostrate all barriers of law, set fire to all violent human passions, and whelm all institutions of blessedness, domestic, civil, and religious, in one blasting, fiery tide of ruin. It leaves no man s character, no man's property, no man's family, safe. I stand here accused of crime in attacking this infernal traffic, and painting its consequences in colors but too faithful to the life.
"That I may not seem to your honor to be dealing in declamation, and that you may have fully before your mind the motive that actuated my efforts, let me here refresh your memory with some of the dreadful statistics dependent on the existence and activity of the distillery. They are statistics of misery, uninterrupted in their recurrence and accumulation, in authenticated estimates, catalogues, and certificates, of the wreck of property and character, and the spread of pauperism, crime, disease, and death. On a calculation taken from one of the most temperate communities, by actual census of the counties of Wayne and Seneca, and five towns in Cayuga county, in the state of New York, and showing one drunkard to every twenty-seven inhabitants, in the fourteen millions of our country, there are at this day more than five hundred thousand drunkards in the United States. Are we startled at the fact? There is nothing speculative in the statement. The returns were made from actual examination, by competent, respectable men, and the particulars of each town were given separately. Does the result seem incredible? Surely we do not meet an intoxicated wretch in every twenty-seven individuals. We may not meet them in our daily walks and occupations. They are not commonly out in the face of the community, and we well know they are not an active, enterprising race. Their very habits exclude them from the sweet light and the wholesome business of society. Theirs are the abodes of filth and raggedness, the homes that they fill with guilt and anguish. Part people our alms-houses and prisons. Part line our canals, and crowd the hidden, impure, and almost subterranean streets of our cities. They inhabit the dens and caves of civilization, the pest-haunts of sin, the cellars, and bar-rooms, and grog-shops. There they congregate; there they inflame their passions, and profane the name of God. But on every occasion of brawls and riots, whenever deeds of wickedness are in progress, or the elements of a mob have opportunity and space for combination, then they emerge from their darkness, and your sight is arrested by savage faces and haggard forms, reeling and reeking from the hot hells, where the stream of the distillery is poured and drank at a thousand fountains.
"Consider next the fearful waste of life attendant on the prosecution of this horrid business. Of these live hundred thousand human beings, between fifty and sixty thousand die every year. Their places are supplied by an unfailing corps, who are passing hourly from the ranks of the so-called temperance drinkers, to the vast body of the intemperate. An immense procession to the grave is thus kept up, whose miserable conscripts are from all families; a stream of diseased and vicious human life, swollen from all classes in society, like the troubled sea, for protracted vice and anguish in this world, and poured annually into an eternal world of ruin!
"It seems little after this, to remind your honor of the national and individual pecuniary loss consequent on the successful business of the distillery. The Attorney-General of the United States has stated the annual loss to the Union from the use of ardent spirits to be one hundred millions of dollars.
