Thus, my lords, is the great source of power and wealth dried up, the numbers of the people are every day diminished, and, by consequence, our armies must be weakened, our trade abandoned, and our lands uncultivated.  To diminish the people of any nation is the most atrocious political crime that it is possible to commit; for it tends not to enslave or impoverish, but to annihilate; not to make a nation miserable, but to make it no longer a nation.

Such, my lords, are the effects of distilled liquors; effects of which I would not have shocked you with the enumeration, had it not been with a design of preventing them; and surely no man will be charged with so trivial an offence as negligence of delicacy, when he is pleading, not for the honour or the life of a single man, but for the peace of the present age, the health of posterity, and the existence of the British people.

After having examined the nature of these liquors, it is natural to inquire, how much they are in use; whether mankind appear to know their quality, and avoid and detest them like other poisons; or whether they are considered as inoffensive, and drank, like other liquors, to raise the spirits, or to gladden the heart; whether they make part of social entertainments, and whether they are handed round at publick tables, without any suspicion of their fatal consequences.

It is well known, my lords, that these liquors have not been long in use among the common people.  Spirits were at first only imported from foreign countries, and were, by consequence, too dear for the luxuries of the vulgar.  In time it was discovered, that it was practicable to draw from grain, and other products of our own soil, such liquors as, though not equally pleasing to elegant palates with those of other nations, resembled them, at least in their inebriating quality, and might be afforded at an easy rate, and consequently generally purchased.

This discovery, my lords, gave rise to the new trade of distilling, which has been now for many years carried on in this nation, and of the progress of which, since the duties were laid upon its produce, an exact account may be easily obtained, which I thought so necessary in our deliberations on this bill, that I have procured it to be drawn out.

From this account, my lords, it will be discovered, what cannot be related without the utmost grief, that there has prevailed, for many years, a kind of contagious infatuation among the common people, by which they have been incited to poison themselves and their children with distilled spirits; they have forsaken those liquors which in former times enlivened their conversation and exalted their merriment, and, instead of ale and beer, rioted of late in distilled spirits.