p. 221 | A Bushel of Corn by Censor

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 8, 1886

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 12, No. 14.

A Bushel of Corn.

By Censor

A FARMER sells a bushel of corn to a laborer for forty cents, and it enables him to work a week and earn a week's wages in raising more corn or in other useful productive work.

He sells another bushel to the distiller at the same rate. This, with the addition of a little strychnine, will make four gallons of whisky, which is worth, say, twenty cents a gallon, or eighty cents, upon which the distiller has gained forty cents. Then the Government comes in and collects $3.60 on this transformed bushel of corn, and it becomes worth $4.40.

Then it goes through the hands of dealers, jobbers, and retailers. They fix it up with water, chemicals, tobacco, turpentine, etc., till it becomes about seven gallons of a variety of liquors in the same cask, all the way from old French brandy (private stock) worth $20 a gallon, down to common rat-poison whisky, at $2.50, according as people ask for it.

When retailed over the bar at sixty drinks to the gallon, it yields 420 drinks, at from five to ten cents, or an average of seven and a half cents, amounting to $31.50. And the farmer, and his neighbors, and his workmen, buy back the bushel of corn at a loss of the corn and $31.10 cash. And probably ten days' work is lost, a fight or two raised, and a lawsuit incurred, or a crime committed.

Query: How much clear profit, exclusive of the virtue of the act, did the farming community and the other people of the township make out of that bushel of corn sold to the distiller.—Censor.