What the Beer Drinker Swallows.
By G. E. Foster
The beer or spirit drinker is wont to look with ill-concealed contempt upon the simple water drinker, and as he tosses off the glass he has just paid his money for, imagines that he has swallowed something far better and performed an action far more sensible. Yet, if he would stop but for a moment to ask what he has just taken, he might think quite differently. Let us see. A barrel of beer contains about 500 glasses. The seller gives about $8 for it, and sells it for five cents a glass, or $25. His profit is 215 per cent. The drinker drops in ten times per day and takes his glass of beer; in fifty days he has consumed the 500 glasses and paid $25 therefor. What has he swallowed? Scientific men say that in the 500 glasses of beer there were 460 glasses of mere water, 25 glasses of pure alcohol, 15 glasses of extracts and gums. So the beer drinker has paid $23 for 460 glasses of water, and impure at that, which he could have had from the nearest spring for nothing, and pure as nature made it. He has had, in addition, 25 glasses of pure alcohol, which is a poison—at enmity with every function of the system, no food, nor a heat producer. And besides all this, he has taken 15 glasses of extract of malt, sugary matter, indigestible gums, etc., etc. Surely, there is no absurdity so absurb. To pay $23 for 460 glasses of impure water, when he could have it pure for nothing, and $2 for forty glasses of poison and mostly indigestible drugs! But it pays the brewers and saloon-keepers to sell water at 215 per cent. advance on all their trouble of barreling and bottling it.—Prof. G. E. Foster.