MAINE'S LIQUOR SALES

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Feb 27, 1901

MAINE'S LIQUOR SALES.

THE daily papers are going thru their annual parade of the amount of liquor sold by the State agencies of Maine, to demonstrate the “failure of Prohibition” in that state.

Those State agencies established for the selling of liquor for medicinal purposes, have sold during the last year more than 11,000 gallons, or, to let the figures stand in all their appalling magnitude, 11,955 gallons of intoxicating liquors. But our friends of the daily press, with an oversight which is marvelous, in view of their usual carefulness and accuracy in cases where the liquor question is involved, have failed to call attention to the fact that the State of Maine has a population, according to the census of 1900, of 694,466 people. So that the amount of liquor thus sold would provide seventeen-thousandths of a gallon for each citizen of the State, or sixty-eight one hundred seventy-fifths of a gill of grog for each inhabitant of the Pine Tree State for a whole year.

Inasmuch as the average annual consumption of liquors in the United States at large has not fallen below 16 gallons per capita in the last ten years, or almost one thousand times Maine’s record, the figures over which our friends are making so much parade are highly significant—of the beneficial results of the policy of prohibition.—New Voice.