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,

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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 soulthe priceless soul-lost by making and selling intoxicating

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 com plex branches of business belonging to the manufacture

LICENSE LAW THE BONE OF CONTENTION. 47

and traffic of the various descriptions of alcoholic liquors, which have hitherto degraded and destroyed millions of human beings, as it is believed, both body and soul, for time and eternity, and is still raging like an overwhelming flood for the destruction of untold millions more!

Hence, in the struggle of years past, the license law has been the bone of contention between the advocates of temperance on principles of total abstinence, and the advocates of human right to make, vend, and consume intoxicating liquors, under sanction of the license law of the land, which declares it to be legal to make and sell all the alcoholic liquors that consumers require. And it is well known that all consumers of alcohol bid defiance fearlessly to all the powers of legal restraint to prevent them from drinking when, where, what, and as much intoxicating liquors as they please, if, by any art or means whatever, they can obtain the infatuating beverage.

Such being the facts, in by-gone years, the advocates of total abstinence have plied their battering-rams of moral suasion so fiercely against the walls of the license law fortification, that the Legislature of the Empire State ventured to exert their legal suasion so far against the license of the sale of intoxicating liquors in public houses of entertainment, as to enact a law of the State of New York, in A. D. 1845, that the legal voters of the State (the City and County of New York excepted), at a special election on a day of the year, legally appointed, solely for said purpose, should determine the question of license or no license in cach town and city ward in the State (excepting as above), by a majority of votes on said election; and that license,

or no license, should accordingly be given to, or withheld from, all innkeepers of each town and city ward in the State (except as above), during the current year; and that the license law of the State should thenceforward be thus decided in each town and city ward as above, by the majority of the legal votes of the people.

This movement began to wear the appearance of assistance from legal authority, to favor the cause of temperance. The result of the first election produced an overwhelming majority of towns and city wards in the State of New York on the 19th of May, A. D. 1846, in which the vote of "No License," from the voice of the sovereign people, resounded in favor of temperance laws. Thus, with much murmuring, the law of "No License" prevailed over the majority of the people of the State of New York for one year, by the voice of the people, the liquor-dealers of New York City and County unmolested, of course!

Doubtless, in default of duty, on the part of temperance legal voters, and by the double diligence of the opposers of temperance, the next annual election gave a decided less majority of towns and city wards in the State afore. said, for "no license." Probably, fearing another trial, the result of the next legislative session (instead of amending and making the law more perfect, as wise and good legislators should have done), was a repeal, instanter, of the law of further reference to the majority of votes of the sovereign people to determine at the poll of election, and thus, by one act of legislative despotism, the temperance cause was for years thrown on to the background of political estimation, covered with the shades of darkness,