p. 285 | THE COST OF LIQUOR

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 24, 1880

THE COST OF LIQUOR.

It is well to keep the fearful facts of the waste caused by liquor constantly in mind and before the people who have not yet joined the prohibition ranks. A cotemporary states it in this way:—

The retail liquor bill of the United States is $750,000,000 the present year. The English Bureau of Statistics declares that every shilling spent for rum, another shilling is required to pay for the consequences. Add, then, $750,000,000 more to take care of the evil results, and we have the enormous aggregate of $1,500,000,000 nearly enough to liquidate the whole national debt.

According to the last census, the entire value of the furniture and apparel of the nation, including jewels, was less than $500,000,000 or $250,000,000 less than the liquor bill of a single year. There is something to show for the money spent for furniture and apparel, but nothing for the money spent for rum, except poorhouses, jails, penitentiaries, rags, misery, and death.

Just forty years ago, a State Temperance Convention of four hundred delegates, in Tennessee, adopted a petition to the Legislature in respect to licensing the sale of liquor, in which were the following pointed questions:—

"Is it right to give authority to sell insanity and deal out sure destruction? If it is right, why should any be forbidden to do it? If not right, why should any be permitted to do it? Why forbid all but 'men of sober life and conversation' to do this, if it be right? Why allow such to do it, if it be wrong? It may be too much to expect from human laws that they protect the morals of society from corruption; but is it too much to ask that they will not throw open the doors of temptation?"

The following persons are non-producers: Manufacturers of intoxicating liquors, 40,000; retail liquor dealers, including clerks, 510,000 drunkards, 600,000; paupers, 300,000; criminals, 200,000; insane and idiots, 20,000; police, 30,000. Total, 1,750,000.

Dr. Charles A Story, of Chicago, says: "The building of asylums, the furnishing medicine and comforts for 4,000 insane people, who die after three years of insanity, and at an average cost of $1,000 each per year, amounts to $12,000,000 a year; and at the same time for 8,000 lunatics who do not die, but are cured after three years' treatment in the asylum, $24,000,000, making a total of $36,000,000 as the triennial cost of insanity caused by drunkenness."

More than $50,000,000 worth of grain is wasted annually in the United States in the manufacture of intoxicating drinks, sufficient to support all the paupers in the country.

There are 65,000 churches, 84,000 ministers, with a church membership of 11,500,000 in the United States. To maintain them it costs less than $48,000,000. There are in our country 250,000 places where liquors are sold, requiring the services of 550,000 persons; selling $740,000,000 worth of liquors.