health, may be fatal to your companion. Although you have neither wife, nor child, nor parent, to lament your absence from home, or expect your return to it with terror; other families, whofe husbands and fathers have been invited to share in your ebriety, or encouraged to imitate it, may justly lay their mifery or ruin at your door. This will hold good, whether the perfon feduced be feduced immediately by you, or the vice be propagated from you to him through feveral intermediate examples. A moralift muft affemble all these confiderations to judge truly of a vice, which ufually meets with milder names, and more indulgence, than it deserves,

I omit those outrages upon one another, and upon the peace and fafety of the neigh

bourhood, in which drunken revels often end; and also those deleterious and maniacal effects, which ftrong liquors produce upon particular conftitutions; because, in general propofitions concerning drunkennefs, no confequences fhould be included, but what are constant enough to be generally expected.

Drunk

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Drunkenness is repeatedly forbidden by St. Paul: Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excefs.''Let us walk honestly, as in the day, not in rioting and drunkenness.' 'Be not deceived, neither fornicators-nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.' Eph. v. 18. Rom. xiii. 13. 1 Cor. vi. 9. 10. The fame apostle likewife condemns drunkenness, as peculiarly inconfiftent with the chriftian profeffion: They that be drunken, are drunken in the night; but let us, who are of the day, be fober.' I Theff. v. 7. 8. We are not concerned with the argument; the words amount to a prohibition of drunkennefs, and the authority is conclufive.

It is a queftion of fome importance, how far drunkenness is an excufe for the crimes which the drunken perfon commits.

In the folution of this question, we will first suppose the drunken person to be altogether deprived of moral agency, that is to fay, of all reflection and forefight. In this condition, it is evident, that he is no more capable of guilt, than a madman; although,

like

like him, he may be extremely mischievous. The only guilt, with which he is chargeable, was incurred, when he voluntarily brought himself into this fituation. And as every man is refponfible for the confequences which he forefaw, or might have foreseen, and for no other, this guilt will be in proportion to the probability of such confequences enfuing. From which principle results the following rule; that the guilt of any action, in a drunken man, bears the fame proportion to the guilt of the like action, in a fober man, that the probability of its being the confequence of drunkenness bears to abfolute certainty. By virtue of this rule, those vices which are the known effects of drunkennefs, either in general, or upon particular conftitutions, are in all, or in men of fuch conftitutions, nearly as crimi nal, as if committed with all their faculties and fenfes about them.

If the privation of reafon be only partial, the guilt will be of a mixt nature. For fo much of his felf-government as the drunkard retains, he is as refponfible then, as at any other time. He is intitled to no abatement beyond the ftrict proportion, in

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which his moral faculties are impaired. Now I call the guilt of the crime, if a fober man had committed it, the whole guilt. A perfon in the condition we defcribe incurs part of this at the inftant of perpetration; and by bringing himself into this condition, he incurred fuch a fraction of the remaining part, as the danger of this confequence was of an integral certainty. For the fake of illustration, we are at liberty to fuppofe, that a man lofes half his moral faculties by drunkenness: this leaving him but half his responsibility, he incurs, when he commits the action, half of the whole guilt. We will also suppose that it was known before hand, that it was an even chance, or half a certainty, that this crime would follow his getting drunk. This makes him chargeable with half of the remainder; fo that altogether, he is responsible in three fourths of the guilt, which a fober man would have incurred by the fame action.

I do not mean that any real cafe can be reduced to numbers, or the calculation made with arithmetical precifion: but these are the principles, and this the rule, by which

our

our general admeasurement of the guilt of fuch offences should be regulated.

The appetite for intoxicating liquors appears to me to be almost always acquired. One proof of which is, that it is apt to return only at particular times and places; as after dinner, in the evening, on the market day, at the market town, in fuch a company, at such a tavern. And this may be the reason, that if a habit of drunkenness be ever overcome, it is upon fome change of place, fituation, company, or profeffion. A man funk deep in a habit of drunkennefs will upon fuch occafions as these, when he finds himself loofened from the affociations which held him faft, fometimes make a plunge, and get out. In a matter of such great importance, it is well worth while, where it is tolerably convenient, to change our habitation and fociety, for the fake of the experiment.

Habits of drunkenness commonly take their rife, either from a fondness for and connection with fome company, or fome companion, already addicted to this practice; which affords an almost irresistible