To John G. Curtis, Preston Armour, Asahel C. Stone, and Geo. W. Ellinwood, Esquires,
COMMISSIONERS OF EXCISE OF THE TOWN OF SMITHFIELD, COUNTY OF MADISON, and STATE OF NEW-YORK:
GENTLEMEN - This Petition comes to you from inhabitants of the town in which you reside, over eighteen years of age.
Your Petitioners, taking it for granted that applications for Tavern Licences will be made to you at your approaching session, beg that you will deny such applications. They represent, that the present public houses in the town of Smithfield afford as ample accommodations for the travelling public, as are contemplated in the law under which you will be asked to grant Tavern licences; and they further represent, that these accommodations would be none the less, were your honorable body to withhold tavern licences, or, in other words, permission to sell intoxicating liquors from all those houses. It is possible, however, that your honorable body may fear that, were you thus to withhold licences, some of the present public houses would cease to be such, and that an inadequate supply of the accommodations in question would follow. But the reasons for concluding that our present public houses will continue such, only on the condition that intoxicating liquors may be sold in them, are insufficient. One of them has, for many years, been cleared of such liquors. But should so improbable an event occur, as the taking down of the signs of the others, new establishments would speedily take their place - and that, too, without the agency of a Board of Excise. There is enough, short of the privilege of selling intoxicating liquors, to secure an adequate number of public houses.
Your Petitioners regard it, then, as a settled point, that the laws of the State, and your oaths to obey them, do not require you to grant tavern licences; and that you cannot consistently grant them, unless you are convinced that a public house in which intoxicating liquors are sold, is more useful - more contributive to human happiness - than one in which they are not sold. But it is of the very reverse of this that you are convinced. Your honorable body is as ready as your petitioners, to admit that, whatever may be said in favor of alcohol for medicinal or mechanical uses, observation and science pronounce it unnecessary for a beverage. But, if unnecessary, how can further indulgence in it be vindicated in the face of the fact, that the drinking of alcoholic liquors makes an annual deduction from American wealth of more than one hundred millions of dollars; makes one-twelfth of all the American people, who drink them, drunkards; and opens yearly in our drunkenness - smitten land forty thousand graves for the bodies of those whose spirits cannot "enter into the kingdom of Heaven."
But your honorable body need not take this extended view to learn whether it is wise to continue the sale of intoxicating liquors in any of the public houses of the town of Smithfield. The history of those in which it is sold, is quite sufficient to solve the question. Let the keeper of either make out the most imposing and exaggerated array of the benefits it has yielded by the sale of such liquors; and still there will be found an infinite overbalance of those benefits in the desolations of conjugal hopes, in the hunger and nakedness of children, in the frightful temporal and spiritual ruin, produced by those identical liquors. For proof of the truth of our assertion, we need not go to the church-yards of our town, where recollections of the woes of drunkenness throng around so many tombs. Some of the unhappy ones, whom present, as well as former, public houses of the town of Smithfield, have made and continued drunkards, still live - and live, too, to testify in their own unutterable wretchedness, that the evils of selling intoxicating liquors for a beverage are as real and measureless, as the benefits o are trivial and imaginary.
Deeply do your Petitioners regret that the statute book of our State impliedly sanctions the practice of drinking intoxicating liquors. - Whilst it continues to do so, it will be but a too successful snare to the public conscience. But if it were ever safe to graduate our morals by human, instead of divine laws, it surely cannot be safe to graduate them by the laws enacted on the subject of intoxicating liquors, before the public mind had been led to the conclusion of the uselessness of such liquors as a beverage. We have before shown, however, that even human laws do not require you to grant tavern licences. But if they did, we should trust that you would not obey them. We should look for your response to the law of love written upon your hearts. We should expect you to declare with an Apostle: "We must obey God rather than man." We should expect you to resign your offices, if you found that they require you to curse rather than to bless your fellow-men - to sin against rather than to serve your Maker.
In conclusion, your petitioners implore your honorable body, in the name of the drunkard, his wife, and his children - in the name, too, of the sober, who, whilst tavern licences are granted, are exposed to become drunkards - to refuse to grant such licences. They implore you to do so, even though it should be at the probable loss of your popularity and your offices. They implore you to take such a stand for truth and temperance, for God and humanity, that generations to come shall rise up and call you blessed.
SMITHFIELD, April 13, 1841.
N.B. Let this Petition be signed and sent to the Store of James Barnett, in Peterboro, by May 1, 1841.
