There was little of the moral censor or the preacher in the early _Evening Post_. Yet it did not neglect the city’s manners. Temperance sentiment was then weak, but the journal lamented the excessive number of corner groggeries; for in New York licenses cost but 40 shillings, and liquor-selling was more extensive than in Boston or Philadelphia. In 1810 the Mayor and Excise Commissioners granted 3,500 licenses, and it was estimated that of the city’s 14,000 families, no less than 2,000 gained a livelihood through the drink trade. Their little shops, many of them in cellars, were reported to exhibit perpetual scenes of riot and disorder. Six years later a writer in the _Evening Post_ computed that there were more than 1,500 retail establishments for liquor, and added that it were better to let loose in the streets 1,500 hungry lions and tigers. The editor favored a heavy Federal tax to abate the evil. The journal had the courage in 1818 to take a stand against lotteries, then resorted to not only for private gain, but to raise capital for bridges, canals, turnpikes, colleges, and churches. Their abolition would mean a sacrifice to the _Evening Post_, for in some periods of previous years they had furnished one-fifteenth or one-twentieth the whole advertising. But Coleman’s heart was touched by the losses of the poor. “Look at the crowd of poor, ragged wretches that beset the office-keeper’s doors the morning after the day’s drawing is over, waiting with their little slips in their hands, to hear their fate, and the yesterday’s earnings ready to be given to the harpies that stand gaping for the pittance.” He thought there were two palliatives short of abolition: first, to price the tickets so high that only people of means would gamble; and second, as in England, to compel managers to finish the drawings in a week or ten days, so as to end the pernicious practice of insuring the fate of tickets. Three years later, in 1821, an act passed providing that no new lotteries should be authorized. The _Evening Post_ said nothing against public executions, which during the first quarter of the century drew crowds of thousands; but it did cease at an early date, on principle, to publish long accounts of them. In June, 1819, it barely mentioned the fact that a great concourse gathered for the execution in Potter’s Field, now Washington Square, of a negress named Rose Butler for attempted arson, and that the disappointment was keen when she was respited. Next month her actual hanging was recorded in five lines. Imprisonment for debt was repeatedly attacked by the editor.