The Temperance Cause by Editor

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Feb 21, 1878

The Temperance Cause.

By Editor

We are earnestly committed to the temperance cause. Nor do we merely hold to it nominally. For a quarter of a century our people have been taking strong ground upon Christian temperance, and our ministers have lectured and written in favor of it. All our ministers make it a part of their duty to preach upon it frequently. We have a monthly Journal, entitled The Health Reformer, devoted to physical, mental and moral culture, which takes high ground upon the subject of temperance. We bid a hearty God speed to those engaged in this noble cause.

We call the attention of the reader to the following startling figures setting forth the enormity of the liquor traffic in the United States, from the Christian Statesman of 1871.

“Those who would measure the enormity of the liquor traffic by the money which it absorbs, will be impressed by some figures presented by Mr. Edward S. Young, Chief of the U. S. Statistical Bureau, at a meeting of the Congressional Temperance Society, in Washington, last Sunday evening. Mr. Young stated the annual product of whisky in this country to be, according to the returns made to the government, 62,500,000 gallons, representing a money value of $375,000,000; fermented liquors, 6,300,000 barrels, worth $126,000,000; imported liquors, $100,000,000. There are in the United States 150,000 licensed liquor stores, whose average annual sales are $4,000 each, making a total of $600,000,000; and this exhibit he thought was probably $100,000 below the facts. Mr. Young used the following comparisons, to enforce his statistics:—”

“An expert could not count more than $20,000 in one-dollar notes in one day. Working twenty-five days in a month, it would take one man one hundred years to count the money. If spread upon the ground in notes of the same denomination, it would cover an area of 20,446 acres. If paid in gold, a ton of which is worth $574,000, and loaded on wagons, each carrying one ton, and occupying a space of seven yards, it would require 1,045 wagons, which would form a procession six miles long. In silver, worth $31,200, it would require 19,230 wagons, which would form a line of seventy-nine miles in length. To complete the picture, let the wives and children of drunkards, and the widows and orphans of those who have died drunkards during the past year, follow these wagons in melancholy procession, their cries of anguish ascending to Heaven, and the line would extend thousands of miles.”

“And all this, not only taken from the productive capital and labor of the country, but used in such a way as to weaken its productive power, and increase crime and misery of every form. And yet society tolerates this horrid traffic, and government legalizes and protects it, for the filthy pittance which it drops into the treasury.” W. M. H.