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A TRUE TEMPERANCE EXPERIENCE.

and point out some of the characteristical treasures and enjoyments of a life of temperance. Faithful to their cause, their testimony would be thus: "We drink no intoxicating liquors, at home or abroad, in any company or business, under any circumstances whatever, except as a medicine. Total abstinence is our pledge; to keep it is our enjoyment. The labors, privations, restrictions, and fulfillments of all the specifications of our respective constitutions and pledges are confessedly our duties, the performance of which gives zest to all other enjoyments of life. And our increasing desire is to see the temperance cause flourish, until the liquor trade and craft are overthrown from the foundation to the top-stone, and this globe of earth shall become a sober world."

The sum of the whole matter, then, is, temperance shows what the proper business of life is, and how to perform it. By temperance, the burdens of life are lightened; many of its woes are banished—its proper enjoyments are enlivened and the great object of our existence on earth, in preparation for the grave and eternity, through faith alone in the Divine. Redeemer, in connection with all the incumbent duties of true Bible religion, is greatly sweetened by total abstinence temperance principles, which contribute to the enjoyments of life, instead of loading it with burdensome drudgery. Such is the experience of all true advocates and lovers of the blessed Temperance Reformation. Hence, temperance proves to be a blessing; intemperance is always a curse. Temperance is of God; intemperance is of Satan. Temperance is essential to human happiness; intemperance fills the earth with

EXTERMINATING WAR OF PRINCIPLE.

wretchedness.

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And hence the conflicting principles of

Temperance and Intemperance have introduced into the world a fifth epoch of the Temperance Reformation, which has opened and already resulted in a

POLITICAL, EXTERMINATING WAR OF PRINCIPLE,

by the introduction of appeals for legal aid in relation to the cause of temperance. First, for the continuance and improvement of the licence law to promote the liquor craft monopoly against alleged or implied encroachments and innovations of Total Abstinence Temperance Societies; and, secondly, for legal power to suppress the common use of all intoxicating liquors as a beverage, in a manner which would inevitably overthrow the LIQUOR CRAFT MONOPOLY of accumulating wealth, influence, popularity, office, and power to enforce the adoption and execution of national laws for the promotion of drunkenness, wretchedness, pauperism, intolerable taxation, multiplicity of crime, death, and the destruction of millions of souls of the human

race.

The history, cause, and present condition of appeals for legal aid in relation to the Temperance Reformation, pro and con, will now be analyzed and delineated in accordance with principles of total abstinence from all that can intoxicate human beings to a state of drunkenness and ruin.

CAUSE OF APPEAL FOR LEGAL AID AGAINST TEMPERANCE

ENCROACHMENTS.

The history of appeals for legal aid in relation to the influence of the Temperance Reformation on the general

44

LIQUOR-DEALERS' APPEALS.

community is vastly important to be well understood, both in the cause and effect of such appeals.

There are two numerous classes of community, few of whom can ever be reached by any power of moral suasion to enlist under the banner of temperance, by giving their signature to the temperance pledge of total abstinence. Manufacturers of intoxicating liquors, and traffickers in the various species of alcoholic poisonous beverages, are the classes intended by the foregoing allusion. Both of these classes are numerous, and complicated in their business. Manufacturers of intoxicating liquors comprise all the principal employers-manual laborers in every department of the various processes of the manufacture of every kind of intoxicating liquors, whether by malting, fermentation, or distillation; also the constructors of all kinds of vessels to contain the immense variety and quantity of liquors manufactured and necessarily required in their use; and also, all who are directly or indirectly interested in the said manufacture, by furnishing, at market price, grains of any kind, or any other fruits of the earth, or commodities necessary for the manufacture of intoxicating liquors of any kind whatever. All the above interested classes of community must, of course, be enumerated collectively and individually in the general class of liquor manufacturers.

Traffickers in alcoholic liquors comprise the various grades of venders and vendees of any kind or description of intoxicating liquors, including all who are engaged in buying, selling, importing, or exporting, by land or water, in vehicles or ships of the ocean, distributing, far or near, by wholesale or retail, in large or small quantities,

LIQUOR-DEALERS' APPEALS.

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for the accommodation of all consumers of intoxicating drinks, for whose use all the foregoing agencies are employed. These, all combined, constitute one general class of traffickers, or liquor-dealers, who are collectively and individually, directly or indirectly, interested in the traffic or craft of the liquor trade monopoly and business of increasing wealth, by furnishing the means and facilities of making drunkards of filling the world with woes and wretchedness of every descripton that intoxicating liquors can produce, and resulting in the loss of untold millions of human souls!

It must, hence, be perceived, that the two classes thus combined in the manufacture and traffic of intoxicating liquors, constitute an incalculably numerous portion of human beings on this globe of earth. And it can not be successfully denied that all these different ranks and orders of persons, whether principals, subordinate laborers, or contributors in any sense or degree whatever, are engaged and interested in the manufacture and sale of all the various kinds of intoxicating liquors, merely for the sake of GAIN, money-making, to obtain a livelihood for the support of themselves and families, and, if possible, to live in affluence, splendor, popularity, and prodigality; or, otherwise, to hoard up wealth in thousands or millions of dol lars, to be often scattered and wasted in the hands of poor, wretched outcasts of drunken descendants, and their besotted families, when impenitent manufacturers and traffickers of alcohol are dead and gone to their final reward of “ the wages of sin," which is "death," endless death of the soul— the priceless soul-lost by making and selling intoxicating

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LIQUOR DEALERS' APPEAL.

liquors, to make and kill drunkards, and fill the earth with wretchedness and indescribable woes!

Nothing is more evident than the fact that the two above described classes, namely, manufacturers and traffickers of alcoholic liquors, while continuing these pursuits, have proved to be inflexibly opposed to all the instrumentalities and powers of moral suasion for the promotion of the Temperance Reformation. And the reason is no less obvious. They have considered their rights to be invaded in proportion to the advancement of the cause of temperance; because, by temperance movements, customers from their shops of human destruction have been drawn off in all cases of male and female subscriptions to the temperance pledge. This fact can not in truth be denied. To secure their claims of right to make poison, to traffic in the article, to keep it for sale as a necessary commodity in hotels and in all public houses of entertainment, and to deal it out in profusion, and treasure up the profit of poisoning millions of their fellow-mortals to death, for the sake of GAIN, those classes of numerous poison-makers and venders of poison, annoyed by the encroachments of the Temperance Reformation, have SET THE EXAMPLE of an appeal to legal aid for license and protection in their trade, craft, and business of human destruction!

And so deep-rooted and wide-spread had the stratagem of an infernal enemy become in our land, that there was not wanting legislative ingenuity and authority to devise and enact a LICENSE LAW, in all respects adapted for the security and consequent encouragement of all the complex branches of business belonging to the manufacture