Cincinnati’s Intemperance and Its Cost
The fearful condition of Cincinnati, viewed from a temperate standpoint, is well shown in the following item, which we clip from the Inter-Ocean. One hundred and eighty dollars, on an average, for strong drink, from each of the fifty thousand families of the city, is hideously suggestive, not only of the enormous waste of means, but of the crime, poverty, and suffering which must be the inevitable concomitant of this tide of intemperance. It reads:— Cincinnati seems to have demonstrated the truth of the conclusions reached by the Gazette some weeks ago, that the city is very wicked. One of our exchangers, the Council Bluffs Nonpareil, credits this wickedness to the enormous consumption of liquors at Cincinnati, and says: “Not less than twenty-five thousand persons depend upon the profits of saloons for a living, and it is estimated that the 50,000 families which comprise the population of the city expend on an average $140 each per annum for beer alone, or $23.20 per capita, counting six persons to a family. The expenditure for strong drink of all kinds is put at $9,000,000 a year, or $180 per family, equal to $30.12 per capita.” That is a pretty bad record to have so far from home.