England's Staggering Alcohol Consumption in 1876
The people of England are beginning to turn their attention very earnestly to the frightful effects of the wide-spread traffic in alcoholic liquors. Mr. Dawson Burns recently sent a communication to the London News, containing some statistics of startling significance. He states that in 1876 there were purchased more than twenty-nine million gallons of British spirits, more than eleven and a half million gallons of foreign and colonial spirits, more than eighteen million gallons of beer, and eleven million gallons of British wine, cider, etc.,42making a total of intoxicants for the year 1876, of 102,732,898 gallons. The original cost of all this is £133,632,021; add to this the increase in retail prices, and it makes a total of £147,000,000. Those who do not move outside sober circles and never study estimates of national habits, would hardly believe it possible for a Christian nation to produce such figures in the nineteenth century. It involves some eighty-one million gallons of alcohol, a quantity sufficient, if distributed among all the inhabitants of the earth, and swallowed at one time, to kill every man, woman, and child then living on the globe.