But I need not go back so far. Who that is fifty years of age does not remember the aspect of Boston on public days—on the evening of such days? Compare the "Election-day," or the 4th of July, as they wore kept thirty or forty years ago, with such days in our time. Some of you remember tho Celebration of Peace, in 1783; many of you can recollect the similar celebration in 1815. On each of those days the inhabitants from the country towns came here to rejoice with the citizens of this town. Compare the riot, the confusion, the drunkenness then, with the order, decorum, and sobriety of the celebration at the introduction of water last autumn, and you see what has been done in sixty or seventy years for temperance.
A great deal of the crime in Boston is of foreign origin: of the one thousand and sixty-six children vagrant in your streets, only one hundred and three had American
heathenish and idolatrous practice of health-drinking is too frequent. That shameful iniquity of sinful drinking is become too general a provocation. Days of training and other public solemnities have been abused in this respect; and not only English, but Indians have been debauched by those that call themselves Christians… This is a crying sin, and the more aggravated in that the first planters of this colony did… come into this land with a design to convert the heathen unto Christ, but if instead of that they be taught wickedness … the Lord may well punish by them… There are more temptations and occasions unto that sin, publicly allowed of, than any necessity doth require. The proper end of taverns, etc., being for the entertainment of strangers… a far less number would suffice," etc.
Cotton Mather says of intemperance in his time: "To see … a drunken man become a drowned man, is to see but a most retaliating hand of God. Why we have seen this very thing more than threescore times in our land. And I remember the drowning of one drunkard, so oddly circumstanced; it was in the hold of a vessel that lay full of water near the shore. We have seen it so often, that I am amazed at you, O ye drunkards of New England; I am amazed that you can harden your hearts in your sin, without expecting to be destroyed suddenly and without remedy. Yea, and we have seen the devil that has possessed the drunkard, throwing him into fire, and then kept shrieking, 'Fire! Fire!' till they have gone down to the fire that never shall be quenched. Yea, more than one or two drunken women in this very town have, while in their drink, fallen into the fire, and so they have tragically gone roaring out of one fire into another. O ye daughters of Belial, hear and fear, and do wickedly no more."
The history of the first barrel of rum which was brought to Plymouth has been carefully traced out to a considerable extent. Nearly forty of the "Pilgrims" or their descendants were publicly punished for the drunkenness it occasioned.
