An Honest Saloon Advertisement.
By Judas Heartless
FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS: Grateful for the liberal encouragement received from you, and having supplied my tavern with a new and ample stock of choice wines, spirits, and lager beer, I thankfully inform you that I continue to make drunkards and beggars for the sober, industrious, and respectable community to support. My liquors may excite you to riot, robbery, and bloodshed; and will certainly diminish your comforts, augment your expenses and shorten your lives. I confidently recommend them as sure to multiply fatal accidents and distressing diseases, and likely to render these incurable. They will agreeably deprive some of life, some of reason, many of character, and all of peace; will make fathers fiends, wives widows, mothers cruel, children orphans, and all poor. I will train the young to ignorance, dissipation, infidelity, lewdness, and every vice; corrupt the ministers of religion, obstruct the gospel, defile the church, and cause as much temporal and eternal death as I can. I will thus "accommodate the public," it may be at the cost of my worthless soul. I have a family to support—the trade pays and the public encourage it. I have a license from the magistrate; my traffic is lawful, even Christians countenance it; and if I do not bring these evils upon you somebody else will. I know the Bible says "Thou shalt not kill;" pronounces a "Woe unto him that giveth his neighbor drink;" and enjoins me not to "put a stumbling-block in a brother's way." I also read that "no drunkard shall inherit the kingdom of God," and I cannot expect a drunkard-maker, without repentance, to share a better fate; but I wish a lazy living, and deliberately resolved to gather the wages of iniquity and fatten on the ruin of my species. I shall therefore carry on my trade with energy, and do my best to diminish the wealth of the nation, impair the health of the people, and endanger the safety of the State. As my traffic flourishes in proportion to your ignorance and sensuality, I will do my utmost to prevent your intellectual elevations, moral purity, social happiness, and eternal welfare. Should you doubt my ability, I refer to the pawn shop, the police office, the hospital, lunatic asylum, jail, and the gallows, where so many of my customers have gone. The sight of them will satisfy you that I do what I promise. N. B.—I teach old and young to drink, and charge only for the materials; a very few lessons are enough.