The bases of the temperance reform: an exposition and appeal./ With replies to numerous objections. By Rev. Dawson Burns.

Soiime Objectionis Anszered.
of God, accompanied in the very act with the greatest
evils to mankind, can be imagined than that which is
here disclosed? The rain, the soil, the sunshine, join to
produce miles upon miles of nutritious grain, rippling
like a silver sea under a harvest moon; but the nourishment latent in all this grain, instead of being converted
into blood and muscle, vital force and length of days, is
disposed of with so much ingenious perversity that the
national result is loss of wealth and health, ignorance and
vice, violence and bloodshedding, insanity and irreligion,
brutal living and hopeless dying. What sadder contrast
can be conceived than the corn-field with its potentiality of blessing, and the gin-cask or beer-barrel with its
plenipotentiality of physical and moral woe! The art by
which this metamorphosis is executed cannot claim to be
the philosopher's stone, turning whatever it touches into
gold; rather, a fitter object of comparison is the Gorgon
head, with its snaky hair, changing into stone everything
mortal that gazed upon it. Or, varying the allusion, it
may be affirmed that in the substitution of distiLled and
fermented liquors for harmless and invigorating food, the
nation asking for bread receives a stone, and, looking for
an egg, clasps a serpent to its breast.
OBJECTIONS.
I. One objector may urge that "all the zztlr'itiots mzatler
iz; the corn tl,us cased is ztol lZst, a _orlioiz re;zaizinizg i/z the
l'quor brewed, and a fiortiot goire;zn z the shabe of grains to
feed animn;als of dzserent kinds." It is, however, a very
feeble plea in mitigation of sentence against the brewing
process (the distilling process does not admit of even this
weak defence), that eight parts out of eighty-eight parts
ocf nutriment are retained in what is brewed, and this
rather by accident than by design, since clearness and not
thickness is desiderated by the brewer and the drinker
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