WHEN the war closed seventeen years ago, and the nation had its dead sons and widowed wives, sad mothers and children, it had an enormous debt. It had cost the United States Government, the States, and cities, and towns of the North no less than $6,165,237,000 to complete the war. It had cost the South not less than $2,000,000,000, making a total expense to the country of $8,165,237,000. It is a sad and terrible record. But let it be remembered that every year since the war closed, the people of our country have paid alone for alcoholic drinks more than $600,000,000. Or in fifteen years the sum of $9,000,000,000. In this we count, not the vast and far-reaching and enormous sums of money expended and lost through degradation and crime, which the poor and the rich have expended through accursed drink, but simply the drink bill of the Nation. The reader may add to this the cost of crime, poverty, idiocy, loss of productive labor, etc. But the drink bill alone of these fifteen years would have paid every dollar of the cost of the war, and left remaining on hand for good uses $834,783,000. This is a commonly known fact. It is enough to startle our nation, and make the Christian people reel with wonder. What have we for these wasted resources of our fair land? What remuneration comes to us for the expenditure of money for the seething, liquid fire? Ask our homes of disgrace, poverty, and ignorance! Ask our homes of sorrow, of shame, of bereavement, of broken vows, and utter helplessness? Ask our city prisons, our jails, our penitentiaries, and our insane asylums, all filled with victims of strong drink. Ask the court-room, the poor fellow pinioned on the gallows and dropping into eternity; ask these what we have to show for our drink bill! During four years of civil war it was estimated that 1,000,000 lives were lost, but in these seventeen years which have passed since they fell, this war of intemperance has murdered not less than seven or eight times that number of our fellow-beings. Natis, the king of Sparta, had erected a sorcerous figure of his wife Apego, royally clad, and into the hideous embrace of this gorgeously-clad machine, he thrust those he would punish. The sharp irons which were concealed under the clothing of the hellish machine proved the death of many a poor man who was clasped in its iron arms. Such is the awful and inhuman and hellish structure, the whisky traffic, whose sorcerous and lecherous arms are around the nation. It ought to cry out to God for speedy deliverance.—Religious Telescope.