Salt River Journal

FOR THE JOURNAL.

Mr. Editor—The time is fast approaching when the representatives of the people will meet at Jefferson for the purpose of enacting such laws as society require. Notwithstanding party politics have run very high, yet I do hope the members of our legislature will consider the interest of the whole community. There is one subject, Mr. Editor, which ought to attract their attention. (as I conceive it the business of a legislative body to reform society) and that is, the vending ardent spirits in the shops called groceries: that subject our Legislature took into consideration at its last session, but so framed the law as to leave it with the county court whether it should take effect or not, and some courts set it aside without even a petition from the grocery keepers themselves; and had there been a thousand petitioning to that effect, it would have been wrong in the court to hear them.

Of all the evils that afflict our American land, that of vending ardent spirits is surely the greatest; and those persons engaged in the infamous traffic deserve less protection by legislative enactments. To see a healthy, likely, and otherwise gentlemanly looking man, keeping a grocery with a few barrels and bottles, and scarcely any thing else, and his group of topers around him at his board, some swearing and boasting, others snoring the fumes away, or just awake and calling for another drink, while perhaps some of those wretches have families who are in a state of suffering; wife and children deprived of the necessaries to render them comfortable, to go into the pockets of the dram selling gentry, ought to be disgusting to every lover of good order throughout the length and breadth of our land and imperiously demand legislative interference in behalf of the most helpless part of the community. I venture to assert that there has not been a grocery kept at any place for a few years, that has not to some extent filled the pockets of the venders and increased the amount of human misery and wretchedness in numberless instances within the reach of its direful influence: how many little innocents and their unfortunate mothers, have been in rags while the heads of that family has become more degraded than the grunting swine. The miseries produced by tolerating such establishments baffles all description. I hold it to be dishonest to be engaged in any business that does not render some useful or beneficial equivalent; so far from this being the case, those fellows are filling their pockets with the price of tears and wretchedness. Man is the only created being that is not stationary by instinct morally—he is the most simple and helpless in infancy, and the most capable of receiving instruction or being moulded by the influence of education; no bounds can be set to his downward and depraved course, and none to his rising in virtue and piety: it is therefore desirable by all the virtuous, to have a wholesome atmosphere to raise youth in; purified from those stenches of tipling shops and their attendant evils. Sir, more good will result to the community by passing good laws on this subject, than can possibly be given to us by congress, let who will be our president.— Our legislature at its last session met, professing to know the wants of society, and passed a law and left it with a county court to say whether society needed the law it had made— thereby shifting the responsibility from their shoulders where it ought to be. I am of opinion that some such law as was made at the last session would do much good, and I believe the community would sustain such a law, and support such principles in despite of maddened dram sellers and tiplers.

BEDFORD.