ABSTRACT
The nation is drunk with youth, the new wine of political freedom and democratic ideas. It is a divine intoxication, having its great providential purpose, and its magnificent results; but it is attended by a fearful shadow—intemperance of speculation, intemperance of feeling, intemperance of appetite. Licentiousness and drunkenness are the dreadful weeds that spring up in this hot-house of political and economic earnestness and activity. Every time a man suffers for crimes committed in drunkenness, the conscience and humanity of the public are shocked, as much as though insanity were treated as crime, as it so long was. The enlightened conscience of the world demanded the separation of insanity and crime; it now demands the separation of drunkenness and crime. They must both be restrained, but in distinct ways and for separate ends. Drunkenness is a disease, even when it is a moral weakness and a vice.
