American Union

From the Messenger and Recorder.

WHISKEY REVIVAL.

A trip down the Monongahela, a few days since, to Pittsburg, has painfully convinced us that the business of making and consuming bad whiskey is on the increase. There is a distillery not far the other side of Mason & Dixon's line, that has sold to a single house in Baltimore, in one year, whiskey valued at $17,000! And this is but one out of several similar establishments in the county where it is located.

Farther down the river, perhaps in Allegheny county, we noticed a large new brick building, of two or three stories, occupying a right pleasant location on the bank. The enquiry naturally suggested itself, Is that a County Poor House, (or 'Drunkard's Palace,' as Hunt would style it,) or is it the country seat of a retired millionaire? It was neither, gentle reader; but it is John Somebody's Still-House!! Oh! my country, what a transformation has been effected in the last half century, "Once on a time," in a rough little log shanty, in the head of an obscure hollow, they made rye liquor that was liquor. Why, the old-fashioned topers used to guzzle on and on, until we verily thought that some of them were pickled, and couldn't spoil; —they lived so long! But now the spacious brick palace rears its front in the broad light of day, with a fair exterior, while within are heaps of mouldy corn, and half-rotten potatoes, and cockroaches, and strychnine! the produce of all which is a villainous compound, that swells the carcass, destroys the brain, and kills by wholesale, and O, how quickly! The hellish principle of avarice is stimulated into unwonted activity, at the present time, by a new recipe from Beelzebub's patent office, by which the spirituous product of a bushel of grain is doubled; the distiller producing four gallons from a bushel, instead of two, as formerly; and this by the aid of one of the most active poisons in nature! This state of things will probably continue until the frequency and horribleness of whiskey poisoning shall at length arouse the slumbering masses to an indignant overthrow of the entire system of drunkard making. May the time be hastened!