Intemperance cuts down youth in its vigor, manhood in its strength, and
age in its weakness. It breaks the father's heart, bereaves the doting
mother, extinguishes natural affections, erases conjugal loves, blots
out filial attachments, blights parental hope, and brings down mourning
age in sorrow to the grave. It produces weakness, not strength;
sickness, not health; death, not life. It makes wives widows; children
orphans; fathers fiends, and all of them paupers and beggars. It feeds
rheumatism, nurses gout, welcomes epidemics, invites cholera, imports
pestilence and embraces consumption. It covers the land with idleness,
misery and crime. It fills your jails, supplies your almshouses and
demands your asylums. It engenders controversies, fosters quarrels, and
cherishes riots. It crowds your penitentiaries and furnishes victims to
your scaffolds. It is the life blood of the gambler, the element of
the burglar, the prop of the highwayman and the support of the midnight
incendiary. It countenances the liar, respects the thief, esteems
the blasphemer. It violates obligations, reverences fraud, and honors
infamy. It defames benevolence, hates love, scorns virtue and slanders
innocence. It incites the father to butcher his helpless offspring,
helps the husband to massacre his wife, and the child to grind the
parricidal ax. It burns up men, consumes women, detests life, curses God,
and despises heaven. It suborns witnesses, nurses perjury, defiles
the jury box, and stains the judicial ermine. It degrades the citizen,
debases the legislator, dishonors statesmen, and disarms the patriot. It
brings shame, not honor; terror, not safety; despair, not hope; misery,
not happiness; and with the malevolence of a fiend, it calmly surveys
its frightful desolation, and unsatisfied with its havoc, it poisons
felicity, kills peace, ruins morals, blights confidence, slays
reputation, and wipes out national honors, then curses the world and
laughs at its ruin.