Swallowing a Farm

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Jan 18, 1877

Swallowing a Farm.

Somebody says: “Our Government land costs one dollar an acre, and good whiskey two dollars a bottle. How many men die landless, who, during their lives, have swallowed whole townships?”

There is food for reflection in this statement. Every day of our lives, and almost every hour of each day, we meet individuals not merely landless, but houseless, homeless, penniless, who, in the course of their lives have swallowed ardent spirits enough to pay for land and house, and have money in their pockets besides. But it is not the drinker of ardent spirits alone who thus deprives himself of the comforts of a home. The tobacco-chewer, the cigar-smoker, the young man who spends precious hours of each day and evening in worse than listless idleness. How rarely such persons reflect upon the folly of their course. The young man who smokes three five-cent cigars a day—and many of them use double the quantity, at double the price—puffs away enough in the course of ten years to give him a handsome start in business, or to provide himself a comfortable home.—Irish World.