import it, or sell by the wholesale. If there were no rich men in this trade there would soon be no poor ones! But how does the rich man reconcile it to his conscience? I cannot answer that. It is difficult to find out the number of drink-shops in the city. The assessors say there are eight hundred and fifty; another authority makes the number twelve hundred. Let us suppose there are but one thousand. I think that much below the real number, for the assistant assessors found three hundred in a single ward! These shops are open morning and night. More is sold on Sunday, it is said, than any other day in the week! While you are here to worship your Father, some of your brothers are making themselves as beasts; yes, lower. You shall probably see them at the doors of these shops as you go home; drunk in the streets this day! To my mind, the retailers are committing a great offence. I am no man's judge, and cannot condemn even them. There is one that judgeth. I cannot stand in the place of any man's conscience. I know well enough what is sin; God, only, who is a sinner. Yet I cannot think the poor man that retails, half so bad as the rich man who distils, imports, or sells by wholesale the infamous drug. He knew better, and cannot plead poverty as the excuse of his crime. Let me mention some of the statistics of this trade before I speak of its effects. If there are one thousand drink-shops, and each sells liquor to the amount of only six dollars a day, which is the price of only one hundred drams, or two hundred at the lowest shops, then we have the sum of $2,190,000 paid for liquor to be drunk on the spot every year. This sum is considerably more than double the amount paid for the whole public education of the people in the entire State of Massachusetts! In Boston alone, last year, there were distilled, 2,873,623 gallons of spirit. In five years, from 1840 to 1845, Boston exported 2,156,990, and imported 2,887,993 gallons. They burnt up a man the other day, at the distillery in Merrimack street. You read the story in the daily papers, and remember how the by-standers looked on with horror to see the wounded man attempting with his hands to fend off the flames from his naked head! Great Heaven! It was not the first man that distillery has burned up! No, not by thousands. You see men about your streets, all afire; some half-burnt down; some with all the soul burned out, only the cinders left of the man, the shell and wall, and that tumbling and tottering, ready to fall. Who of you has not lost a relative, at least a friend, in that withering flame, that terrible _Auto da fe_, that hell-fire on earth?