p. 465 | The Liquor Question

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Oct 18, 1883

The Liquor Question.

WHY should the liquor question be so hard to deal with? In every one of our States it is engrossing a large share of public attention. In several of them at this moment political discussion turns largely upon it. "While in value the manufacture of distilled spirits stands to all other manufactures in proportion of only one to seventy, in influence it surpasses them all. Such is the relation of this manufacture to the Government that one-half the entire internal revenue receipts are paid by it, and it has been known to corrupt revenue officers with a lavish hand. It elects aldermen and legislators, and corrupts members of Congress. It stands in the way of good government and good order at every corner. These are plain facts, which no intelligent person can ignore."

Thus speaks a paper of Chicago, the Herald, which, with the other respectable journals of that city, upholds the $500 license law recently enacted by the Legislature of Illinois. The Herald proceeds to consider why it is that this one interest should reappear so persistently at every turn of the political highway. The answer it finds in the nature of the commodity and in the enormous profit of the trade in it. Whisky, it observes, is an article which can be consumed to an unlimited extent, and furnishes an enormous margin of profit between the producer and the consumer. It is worth at wholesale to-day $1.16 a gallon. The total amount consumed last year was upwards of 76,000,000 gallons, of which less than 2 per cent. was used in the arts and for mechanical purposes, leaving upwards of 74,000,000 gallons to be drunk. All of this reached the consumer at prices varying between $8 a gallon and $19, the latter being the current rate over first-class bars. Taking the average at $12, we have a total of $812,000,000 as the price paid in a single year for intoxicants. Taking away from this the cost and the tax, say, $1.16 a gallon, we have left $733,840,000 as the gross profits of the traffic in a single year.

Now the entire revenue of the general Government for 1882 was $403,525,250, and the entire sum raised by State taxation was $61,612,681. The statistics of municipal expenses are not at hand, but they can scarcely have more than quadrupled the State taxation. In that case the milk in the whisky cocoa-nut is about equal to the entire sums expended for all kinds of Governmental purposes, including interest on all the public bonds and securities. And that is reason enough why the whisky men desire to control legislation, and why, above all things, they strive against anything that bids fair to cut them off from the soft thing they have in their practice at the bar.—Oregonian.