Our Great Drink Bill

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jun 29, 1904

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 30, No. 26.

Our Great Drink Bill.

While less distilled liquors are drunk in this country than in England, our liquor bill is certainly an enormous one. The American Grocer puts forth its statement, whose statistics are based upon official United States reports and carefully-gathered data, and are not compiled in the interest of temperance, but is simply a cold calculation for business purposes. According to this report, one-fourth of all the people in the United States drink alcoholic beverages, and the total intoxicating drink bill for 1893 was $1,451,633,379, or an average expenditure for each drinker of $62.16. The bill is inconceivably big, but the most alarming fact about it is the rapid rate at which it is annually increasing.

There has been a steady growth in the use of intoxicating drink for more than twenty years, and the consumption per capita is now about twice what it was twenty-three years ago. In 1880 it was 10.50 gallons, and to-day it is 19.98 gallons. The great bulk of this drink is beer, the consumption of which last year reached the enormous amount of 1,449,879,952 gallons, or an average per capita of 18.04 gallons. The total expense to the nation for its beer alone last year was $727,042,245. The year's consumption of distilled liquors amounted to 120,000,000 gallons, an increase of one-tenth gallon per capita, the largest increase in any single year in our history.

The government tax on imported liquor alone amounted to $128,000,000, and the total expense for distilled spirits to drinkers exceeded that for beer. The total average cost a head for coffee, tea, and coco every year is $2.61, while for intoxicating drink it is $62.16, or twenty-four times as much. These words are a powerful temperance sermon. If their inner history could be disclosed, what a revelation would it be of poverty and suffering, vice and crime and death! What a great and bitter cry would we hear from wrecked homes and hungry children and heart-broken wives and ruined lives! The ghastly disclosure would appall and overpower us. The most terrible war that ever desolated our land is not half so frightful. This enormous drink bill is our greatest shame and our greatest peril.—Christian Work.