it not whet the assassin’s knife?  Does it not cock the highwayman’s pistol?  Does it not wave the incendiary’s torch?  Has it not sent the physician reeling into the sick-room; and the minister with his tongue thick into the pulpit?  Did not an exquisite poet, from the very top of his fame, fall a gibbering sot, into the gutter, on his way to be married to one of the fairest daughters of New England, and at the very hour the bride was decking herself for the altar; and did he not die of delirium tremens, almost unattended, in a hospital?  Tamerlane asked for one hundred and sixty thousand skulls with which to build a pyramid to his own honor.  He got the skulls, and built the pyramid.  But if the bones of all those who have fallen as a prey to dissipation could be piled up, it would make a vaster pyramid.  Who will gird himself for the journey and try with me to scale this mountain of the dead—­going up miles high on human carcasses to find still other peaks far above, mountain above mountain white with the bleached bones of drunkards?

The Sabbath has been sacrificed to the rum traffic.  To many of our people, the best day of the week is the worst.  Bakers must keep their shops closed on the Sabbath.  It is dangerous to have loaves of bread going out on Sunday.  The shoe store is closed:  severe penalty will attack the man who sells boots on the Sabbath.  But down with the window-shutters of the grog-shops.  Our laws shall confer particular honor upon the rum-traffickers.  All other trades must stand aside for these.  Let our citizens who have disgraced themselves by trading in clothing and hosiery and hardware and lumber and coal take off their hats to the rum-seller, elected to particular honor.  It is unsafe for any other class of men to be allowed license for Sunday work.  But swing out your signs, and open your doors, O ye traffickers in the peace of families and in the souls of immortal men.  Let the corks fly and the beer foam and the rum go tearing down the half-consumed throat of the inebriate.  God does not see!  Does He?  Judgment will never come!  Will it?

It may be that God is determined to let drunkenness triumph, and the husbands and sons of thousands of our best families be destroyed by this vice, in order that our people, amazed and indignant, may rise up and demand the extermination of this municipal crime.  There is a way of driving down the hoops of a barrel so tight that they break.  We have, in this country, at various times, tried to regulate this evil by a tax on whisky.  You might as well try to regulate the Asiatic cholera or the smallpox by taxation.  The men who distil liquors are, for the most part, unscrupulous; and the higher the tax, the more inducement to illicit distillation.  Oh! the folly of trying to restrain an evil by government tariff!  If every gallon of whisky made—­if every flask of wine produced, should be taxed a thousand dollars, it would not be enough to pay for the tears it has wrung from the eyes of widows and orphans, nor for the blood it has dashed on the Christian Church, nor for the catastrophe of the millions it has destroyed for ever.