This 8-page manuscript speech was written by a currently unidentified author in the United States seeking the presidency in a temperance society, perhaps sometime in the 1840s or 1850s. The orator addressed "Fellow Citizens" and focused their anti-alcohol rhetoric on moral, social, and political issues. They focused on the fiscal costs of prosecutions, imprisonment, and overcrowded jails; on election corruption due to intemperate men selling their votes for alcohol money; and on the damnation of "drunkards" resulting from the immorality of liquor distributors. He expressed sympathy for the intemperate while simultaneously blaming them for moral failings. Brief references to the sex of the intemperate and conflict with Great Britain are present. The orator occasionally drew language and comparisons used in speeches and letters of the American Temperance Union, New-York Society for the Promotion of Intemperance, and others. The manuscript is made up of loose pages, hand-sewn on the left.
Features of this speech include:
- Alcohol should only be consumed as prescribed by a "temperance Physician."
- The intemperate include not only laboring classes, but legislators and justice officials.
- The "stability of our free institutions" is at stake because of intemperate people's willingness to sell their votes for funds to purchase alcohol; the speaker claims that thousands of votes have been corrupted and that political parties filter money into elections for this purpose.
- Enough money is spent on alcohol to pay off the United States' foreign debt. Estimates $15,000,000/year spent in "this state alone."
- Bar rooms prepare people for crimes and God never gave people the right to get drunk. Distilleries are "smoking breathing holes of hell"; "...there are men, who would build grogshops, on a volcano if they could make money by it -- Nay they would go down, to the verry confines of hell and build grogshops there if they could only make money --" Reformed men should take their old rags and give them to the rum sellers, so that they might become paper makers. The drinker is wicked.
- Female drinkers are few and far between (crossed out is a sentence saying "but, I have saw a woman beastly drunk between this and the borough").
- Some of the intemperate succeed in escaping, but those who do not might become robbers or pirates. Wives, children, and society lose nothing when the drunkard dies, regardless of whether he has been a "tender father, a finished scholar, a profound statesman," but the addict loses his soul. They end up "Frozen in a storm, or drowned, or dying on his bed of straw, with delirium tremens, devils seizing him before his time, with none to care for him, none to lament him."
- "Drunkards demand our sympathy, I make no apology for drunkenness -- It is a sin, for which there can be no apology -- The moderate drinker, is master of himself -- He does what he does, deliberately, of free choice, feeling, and knowing, as he says, that there is no danger." But this is a slippery slope.
- "The Queen of England might send an army against us, and we could drive them into the sea -- But we must fight against intoxicating drinks by letting it alone come forward sign the pledge..."
