The Hillsborough Recorder

Extract from a late number of the North-American Review

"This article has already grown so long, that we can do no more than touch briefly on one topic in the chapter of prevention; but this we cannot pass over silently, because it relates to an evil that of all others, the most extensive and appalling. Our readers have already anticipated that we allude to the unrestrained manufacture and sale of ardent spirits. Nothing is more common than the use of what was originally poetic language in speaking on this subject. People talk of swallowing distilled poison and maddening draughts; but these expressions have ceased to be figurative. Though we are fully aware of the mischief, though we have seen it demonstrated to be almost the sole cause of all the suffering, the poverty, and the crime to be found in this country, we still proceed without any attempt to lessen or to arrest it. We convert the exuberance of our harvests, which the bounty of Providence has bestowed, into a seductive poison, where the ingredient is a devil. There is not only no restraint on the production of the article, but facility is afforded for its distribution. Men who are too lazy to work, are allowed nearly without a check to entice others to lose their property, and their honesty in these infernal draughts. Formerly a dram could only be obtained at a tavern, but now every store in the country is turned into a dram shop; while in the cities they spring up in every street and at every corner. No farmer can go to purchase necessaries for his family without being exposed to temptation; no laborer can get to his home without passing a score of these tippling houses, but for which he would have gone home sober to his family. If he passes them at first, they are sure to decoy him at last. Fatigued, thirsty, and seeing them surrounded with his companions he may go by a few times, but he begins to enter by degrees, the practice soon becomes a habit, and he finally consumes his earnings and his strength within their pestilent attraction.—Yet with all this acknowledged, this immense and we fear increasing mischief, when a moderate tax would be some check upon it; a tax that would supply all the deficiencies of the treasury, and be levied upon the most noxious of all luxuries, we find the legislators of this nation shrink from imposing it, in fear for their popularity!"