II. Let the common people (who constitute the wealth and strength of our country) be preserved from the effects of ardent spirits. Had I a double portion of all that eloquence which has been employed in describing the political evils that lately threatened our country, it would be too little to set forth the numerous and complicated _physical_ and _moral_ evils which these liquors have introduced among us. To encounter this _hydra_ requires an arm accustomed, like that of Hercules, to vanquish monsters. Sir William Temple tells us, that formerly in Spain no man could be admitted as an evidence in a court, who had once been convicted of drunkenness. I do not call for so severe a law in this country. Let us first try the force of severe manners. Lycurgus governed more by these, than by his laws. "Boni mores non bonæ leges," according to Tacitus, were the bulwarks of virtue among the ancient Germans. III. I despair of being able to call the votaries of Bacchus from their bottle, and shall therefore leave them to be roused by the more eloquent twinges of the gout. IV. Let us be cautious what kind of manufactures we admit among us. The rickets made their first appearance in the manufacturing towns in England. Dr. Fothergill informed me, that he had often observed, when a pupil, that the greatest part of the chronic patients in the London Hospital were Spittal-field weavers. I would not be understood, from these facts, to discourage those manufactures which employ women and children: these suffer few inconveniences from a sedentary life: nor do I mean to offer the least restraint to those manufactories among men, which admit of free air, and the exercise of all their limbs. Perhaps a pure air, and the abstraction of spiritous liquors, might render sedentary employments less unhealthy in America, even among men, than in the populous towns of Great-Britain. The population of a country is not to be accomplished by rewards and punishments. And it is happy for America, that the universal prevalence of the protestant religion, the checks lately given to negro slavery, the general unwillingness among us to acknowledge the usurpations of primogeniture, the universal practice of inoculation for the small-pox, and the absence of the plague, render the interposition of government for that purpose unnecessary.