July 23 Friday – In Hartford Sam wrote to Pamela Moffett. Sam had utter disdain for the temperance activists, who he said blamed the maker of rum and not the drinker of it.

One could with as much sense say that God is the personage who should shoulder the blame for the sin that is in the world (& suffer punishment) because He made sin attractive….There is no estimating the harm that a few Goughs in temperance & a few Beechers in religion are able to do. Both causes would be much better off if both these persons had died in infancy….I hate the very name of total abstinence. I have taught Livy at last to drink a bottle of beer every night; & all in good time I shall teach the children to do the same. If it is wrong, then, (as the Arabs say,) “On my head be it!” [MTL 6: 515].

Sam also wrote James R. Osgood again about allowing Gill to sell the 2,000 books of the “Treasure-Trove” series already printed, enclosing a card Sam suggested be shown to Gill & Co. by his attorney [MTL 6: 516-8].