INTRODUCTION.

In undertaking to discuss a subject so comprehensive, important, and complicated, as that which the following essay professes to embrace, the writer is fully aware that, in order to do ample justice to it, he had need possess talents of a far higher order, than he has reason to believe have been allotted to him, and a much larger amount of such information, as particularly relates to it, than he has been enabled to obtain.

He would have been happy had some master spirit of the age attempted to immortalize his genius, and to exhibit the holy ardour of his philanthropy, and christian benevolence, as well as the purity and sincerity of his patriotism, by devoting his concentrated powers to such a theme: but in the absence of such an enterprise, he is willing to be thought chargeable with a measure of presumption, rather than not make

though it be but a feeble effort, to stay the progress of what he cannot but regard as the greatest evil by which his country is afflicted.

On the part of many, he is well aware, that his labours will meet with the harshest criticism; and that by many they will be treated with the utmost contempt. To the christian he would chiefly address himself; well knowing that it is by the rightly-directed zeal, and self-denying benevolence, joined to the earnest prayers, of the followers of the Son of God, that the happiness of the world is, mainly, to be promoted. On the part of such, he has a right to expect the exercise of that candour, which will give him credit for the purity of his motives; and of that charity, which will lose sight of unimportant imperfections, while finding that his object is to promote the glory of God and the happiness of man. To discover that his views of Total Abstinence from all intoxicating liquors, are disapproved by many who are justly placed among the pious and judicious, will by no means excite his astonishment, much less move his resentment. He only asks that such of his readers, as may not hitherto have thought with him on this subject, will give it the most serious consideration, and earnestly pray that they may be directed into the truth concerning it. Many great and good men, both