Increase of Liquor Drinking.
By Editor
THE following statistics show that, in spite of the vigorous blows struck by temperance reformers, the liquor traffic is not destroyed by any means:— “The report just issued from the National Bureau of Statistics shows a steady increase during the past five years in the consumption of liquors in this country. The consumption (not manufacture) of distilled spirits during the years 1878, 1879, 1880, 1881, and 1882, respectively, were 57,111,982, 54,278,475, 63,526,694, 70,607,081, and 73,556,036 gallons. For the same years the consumption of wines, native and foreign, was 19,812,675, 24,532,015, 28,484,428, 24,231,106, and 25,628,071 gallons. But the chief increase has been in malt liquors, which aggregated 310,653,253, 345,076,118, 414,771,690, 444,806,373, and 527,051,236 gallons.” These figures give the simple facts, and are not gotten up in the interest of temperance. But they prove one thing beyond the shadow of a doubt, and that is that the use of beer and wine does not tend to diminish the use of other intoxicating drinks. They show, what temperance people have always claimed, that the use of any intoxicant only creates an appetite for intoxicants as a class. Some will also use these figures to show that all this temperance agitation has done no good, but it does not strike us in that way. If the liquor traffic has increased so rapidly, notwithstanding the great amount of temperance work, what would it have been had nothing been done to check it?