p. 131 | The Liquor Traffic

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 10, 1871

The Liquor Traffic.

OF all the evils that curse this earth, the use of intoxicating drinks is one of the worst. And there are few persons who have more than the faintest idea of the terrible magnitude of this rapidly increasing scourge. Many of the following startling facts were embodied in an article in the N. Y. Examiner & Chronicle for April 16, 1868; and others are compiled from sources believed to be substantially correct. They are worthy of the candid attention of every thinking man and woman in the land.

“The latest statistics concerning the increasing production of alcoholic liquors in the United States, are positively frightful. In 1850, the total value of the spirituous and malt liquors manufactured in this country, was about twenty-one and a-half millions of dollars. Ten years later, in 1860, the production had increased to forty-one and a-half millions.

The increase since 1850 is terrible. About two hundred and forty millions of gallons of intoxicating liquors were produced in 1867, or more than six gallons for each man, woman, and child, in the United States. And as the consumption of alcohol for illuminating, industrial, and medicinal purposes, has largely decreased since the imposition of heavy taxes upon it, the demand for drinking purposes must exceed anything ever known before. Distilleries have increased from 1,193 in 1860, to 3,000 in 1867.

About one hundred and thirty thousand liquor dealing establishments pay government license; 9,820 being in the wholesale and 120,000 in the retail trade. If each establishment occupied a separate house, they would require every building in the city and county of Philadelphia, and twenty thousand houses besides, or enough for another city of 100,000 people; giving one liquor shop to every fifty-three families in this country. These liquor shops, if a frontage of twenty feet were allowed to each of them, would form a solid row of buildings more than four hundred and ninety-two miles long—a distance greater than the railroad route from Boston to Washington by way of New York and Philadelphia. Allowing three attendants to each liquor shop, we have an army of three hundred and ninety thousand persons, a population greater than that of either of the States of Vermont or New Hampshire, or the cities of Boston, Brooklyn, or Baltimore, engaged in this destructive traffic.

The receipts for liquors sold at retail in the United States and territories during the year ending June 30, 1867, as calculated from official returns, by Hon. D. A. Wells, Special Commissioner of the Revenue, amount to one billion, four hundred and eighty-three millions, four hundred and ninety-one thousand, eight hundred and sixty-five dollars ($1,483,491,865), or forty-three dollars for each man, woman, and child, in the country; or nearly one-eighth of the entire annual sales of merchandise of every kind, by dealers, auctioneers and brokers, during the same time; or more than all the gold produced west of the Rocky Mountains in the twenty years from 1848 to 1868; or more than ten times the value of all the church property in the country in 1860; or more than the total value of all the railroads in the United States in 1867, those in Pennsylvania excepted; or more than one-half the entire national debt of the United States!

And these statistics by no means express the pecuniary damage caused by this overrunning curse. These tell what is paid for the intoxicating draught, so far as honest returns are made; but who shall estimate the loss of time, health, property, life, peace, comfort, and salvation, which results from this infernal thing? Surely such facts as have been stated abundantly justify the words of Senator Wilson, who says “In this country, and, in this age of light, we have an army of five hundred thousand drunkards; fifty thousand of this army annually sink into a drunkard’s grave. An army of half a million drunkards in Christian America! How fearful the thought! How appalling the spectacle!” And what a comment on the zeal of Christian America, is the fact that the entire church property in the nation would not pay the price of the liquor drank here in six weeks’ time!

Carefully prepared statistics for the State of New York in 1863 and 1866, show in that State 21,242 licensed liquor shops, 6,750 churches, and 11,552 school-houses. With 18,302 school-houses and churches, many of them closed the greater portion of the time, and 21,242 liquor shops running day and night, and often Sundays; with thirty-three thousand ministers and educators, and sixty-three thousand drunkard-makers to oppose them; what wonder that the world rolls on to ruin?—what wonder that the drunken are careless of danger and fearless of doom?—what wonder if there are few saved, in a land where a million of souls die every year, and many millions more are living carelessly, and unprepared for the Great Day?

And more than this: sixty evangelical clergymen, headed by the Rev. Albert Barnes, have in a recent pamphlet, testified that the conversion of the world to Christ was far more rapid during the first three centuries than it is to-day—that the average gain of orthodox churches in the United States for twenty-five years past is only one and a-half members per year—that for eight years past, and probably for thirty years past, since 1837, the gain by conversion and profession is but one member each year (the churches of all the other evangelical orders being no more than this also); that many churches, in cities especially, lose more by death from year to year than they add by profession, and are sustained chiefly by additions by letter—that sixty-one churches in the nine principal cities of New England in one year, 1864, lost more by death than they gained upon profession—that the body of orthodox churches in Connecticut lost in five years, ending 1864, four hundred and eighty by death more than they gained by new converts to Christ—and finally, that in all churches where the ordinary means are relied on, without special effort, and revival, they “barely hold their own from year to year.” And if we survey the world in the aggregate, if we count up the missionary operations of England, Holland, Switzerland, Prussia, and America, and inquire what they are doing to evangelize the world, and what evil men, led on by Satan, are doing to be-devilize it, how stands the record? The amount heretofore annually contributed and appropriated in England to send the light of life to the benighted, is but two and a-half or three millions—a sum only equal to the expenses of the Queen and royal family; a sum not exceeding the annual gifts of idolaters at Kale’s Temple in Calcutta; the donations of one heathen temple equal to those of Christian England! And to the god Tabacum, and the king Alcohol, England pays a hundred-fold more tribute than to Christ.—From “Few Saved, or, The Awful Condition of the World.”