The Gin Industry | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Sep 20, 1883

The Gin Industry.

In 1882 the average number of men each month employed in this State by the Central Pacific Railroad and its leased lines was 12,300, and the amount of money paid to them, exclusive of the president's and director's salaries, was $7,920,000, or an average of over $640 each. During the same year there was about an equal number of men keeping the licensed and unlicensed gin-mills in the State, depending chiefly upon the laboring men of the State for their support. Thus in ten years the Central Pacific Railroad will have paid to labor the sum of $79,200,000, while the gin-mills during the same time will have consumed at least $210,000,000, and turned out upon the streets of San Francisco, to be arrested by the police, 160,000 drunkards, and God only can tell how many paupers, and lunatics, and broken-hearted women, and starving children. These figures are true. They cannot be denied or refuted. Almost every State and city has a similar record.

If the civilization of the age could take hold of such an argument as is involved in this simple statement, and carry it into practical politics as a dollars-and-cents question, great results would soon be obtained.—S. F. Argonaut.