This same disproportionate love of money appears in the fact that men, not driven by necessity, engage in the manufacture, the importation, and the sale of an article which corrupts and ruins men by hundreds; which has done more to increase poverty, misery, and crime than any other one cause whatever; and, as some think, more than all other causes whatever. I am not speaking of men who aid in any just and proper use of that article, but in its ruinous use. Yet such men, by such a traffic, never lose their standing in society, their reputation in trade, their character in the church. A good many men will think worse of you for being an Abolitionist; men have lost their place in society by that name; even Dr. Channing "hurt his usefulness" and "injured his reputation" by daring to speak against that sin of the nation; but no man loses caste in Boston by making, importing, and selling the cause of ruin to hundreds of families--though he does it with his eyes open, knowing that he ministers to crime and to ruin! I am told that large quantities of New England rum have already been sent from this city to California; it is notorious that much of it is sent to the nations of Africa--if not from Boston, at least from New England--as an auxiliary in the slave-trade. You know with what feelings of grief and indignation a clergyman of this city saw that characteristic manufacture of his town on the wharves of a Mahometan city. I suppose there are not ten ministers in Boston who would not "get into trouble," as the phrase is, if they were to preach against intemperance, and the causes that produce intemperance, with half so much zeal as they innocently preach "regeneration" and a "form of piety" which will never touch a single corner of the earth. As the minister came down, the Spirit of Trade would meet him on the pulpit stairs to warn him: "Business is business; religion is religion; business is ours, religion yours; but if you make or even allow religion to interfere with our business, then it will be the worse for you--that is all!" You know it is not a great while since we drove out of Boston the one Unitarian minister who was a fearless apostle of temperance.[36] His presence here was a grief to that "form of piety;" a disturbance to trade. Since then the peace of the churches has not been much disturbed by the preaching of temperance. The effect has been salutary; no Unitarian minister has risen up to fill that place!