A Few Facts by Morning and Day of Reform

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · May 25, 1882

A Few Facts.

By Morning and Day of Reform

TAKE these facts to heart, and show by your vote and by all your acts, that you are bound to protect your hearthstone from the invasion of the rum demon.

In Saltaire, England, a town of 11,000 inhabitants, there is complete prohibition of all intoxicants. Pauperism and crime are almost unknown.

In Bessbrook, Ireland, with 4,000 people, the sale of liquor is completely prohibited. Result: no poor-house, pawn-shop, or police station, and peace and industry reign supreme.

Vineland, N. J., with 10,000 inhabitants, has enjoyed for years the total prohibition of the liquor traffic. Three hundred dollars a year pays the costs of crime. Taxes only one per cent. on valuation.

Seven temperance towns in Delaware County, N. Y., total population about 15,000, have averaged for past eight years less than $12 each for pauperism, crime, police justice and excise, while our town, Coxsackie, N. Y., with seventeen places where intoxicants are sold, and with less than one-fourth the above population, submits to costs for crime, pauperism, etc., to the amount of $1,120.21 per annum.

In the 8,000 licensed, and 2,000 unlicensed saloons of New York City, $60,000,000 are wasted every year that should buy bread, fuel, shoes, and clothing for the people. Yes, and this immense sum is five times wasted; for first, the drinker is incapacitated for labor just in proportion to the amount he wastes in drink; secondly, the original sum thus spent is an absolute waste, bringing not a drop of real, lasting happiness to himself or family, but an ocean of woe; thirdly, this immense sum is drawn from the traffic of the honest business men of New York; fourthly, this traffic is responsible for the great majority of all the costs for courts, police, crime, pauperism, and insanity; fifthly, it robs fifty thousand wives, and a hundred thousand children of their lawful right to a comfortable home, decent clothing, and a well-spread table, and of the love and kindly care of husband and father.

In 1880, the total number of persons arraigned in the police courts of rum-cursed New York City was 71,699, and of these 48,191 were for intoxication and disorderly habits; of the remaining 23,508 a very large proportion were for crimes growing out of the liquor curse.

Is this not enough? Will not business men, as well as Christian men, haste to the rescue, and through the ballot-box, and in every other way put their heel upon this invader of their fireside, and their homes?—Morning and Day of Reform.