by inebriating the Indians with their nominally prohibited and poisoning spirits, they purchase the necessaries of life at four and five hundred per cent cheaper than the orderly traders....

Instead of showing good examples of moral conduct, beside the other part of life, they instruct the unknowing and imitating savages in many diabolical lessons of obscenity and blasphemy." In these statements, contemporary records bear him out.

There is no sadder reading than the many pleas addressed by the Indian chiefs to various officials to stop the importation of liquor into their country, alleging the debauchment of their young men and warning the white man, with whom they desired to be friends, that in an Indian drink and blood lust quickly combined.
Adair's book was published in London in 1775.

He wrote it to be read by Englishmen as well as Americans; and some of his reflections on liberty, justice, and Anglo-Saxon unity would not sound unworthily today.

His sympathies were with "the principles of our Magna Charta Americana"; but he thought the threatened division of the English-speaking peoples the greatest evil that could befall civilization.