Evils of Intemperance

When we behold an individual cut off in youth, or in middle age, or witness the waning energies, improvidence, and unfaithfulness of a neighbor, it is but a single instance, and we become accustomed to it; but such instances are multiplying in our land in every direction, and are to be found in every department of labor, and the amount of earnings prevented or squandered is incalculable : to all which must be added the accumulating and frightful expense incurred for the support of those and their families, whom intemperance has made paupers. In every city and town the poor-tax, created chielly by intemperance, is augmenting. The receptacles for the poor are becoming too strait for their accommodation. We must pull them down and build greater to provide accommodations for the votaries of inebriation ; for the frequency of going upon the town has taken away the reluctance of pride, and destroyed the motives to providence which the fear of poverty and suffering once supplied. The prospect of a destitute old age, or of a suffering family, no longer troubles the vicious portion of our community. They drink up their daily earnings, and bless God for the poor-house, and begin to look upon it as, of right, the drunkard's home, and contrive to arrive thither as early as idleness and excess will give them a passport to this sinecure of vice. Thus is the insatiable destroyer of industry marching through the land, rearing poor-houses, and aug- menting taxation : night and day, with sleepless activity, squandering property, cutting the sinews of industry, unuennimttg vigor, engendering disease, paralysing intellect, impairing moral principle, cutting short the date of life, and roll- ing up a national debt, invisible, but real and terrific as the debt of England" continually transferring larger and larger bodies of men, from the class of contributors to the national income, to the class of worthless consumers.