FEARFUL WASTE | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 20, 1879

FEARFUL WASTE.

In 1794, with a view of raising public revenue, the United States Congress recognized and taxed the liquor traffic. From that time till the close of 1873, the beginning of the Woman's Temperance Crusade, the liquor business of the country gradually increased, till in that year the annual drink bill of the nation had reached the enormous sum of over $600,000,000.

We can hardly comprehend a sum so vast. Many of us never had one million of dollars in all our lives, and so cannot well comprehend how much six hundred million is; but we must try to count out the money. Suppose that this $600,000,000 was yours to invest, and you should buy flour with it at $6 a barrel. If you should load this flour into wagons—ten barrels in each wagon—and start the procession on a roadway, crowding two hundred wagons into each mile, the train of wagons would extend twice around the world; the procession would be 50,000 miles long.

And yet such is the obliquity of their vision that statesman cannot see this fearful waste. Mr. Grow, of Pennsylvania, accounting for the hard times, says that in the three years, 1871, '72, and '73, there were built in the United States 19,398 miles of railroad. But if we had the amount that passes over the liquor dealers' counters each year, we could build twenty thousand miles of railroad and stock the whole line each year.

Mr. Grow, speculating as to the causes of hard times, and with enough of the old Adam in him to try, as did his distinguished predecessor, to throw the blame on woman, says that, “in the three years preceding 1873, there were imported $98,432,165 worth of silks, which, to the consumer, would amount to not less than $200,000,000.” Two hundred millions of dollars in three years seems to us women a small sum as compared with the drink bill in those years, which was over one billion eight hundred million. It is astonishing that Mr. Grow and other statesmen can see the little sums, and pass by the larger ones.

But this is not all. The honest, hard-working people are taxed to support the thousands made paupers and criminals by this traffic. Nearly two-thirds of the amount collected in the shape of taxes is expended to take care of the results of the liquor traffic. Add two-thirds of the taxes to the $600,000,000.

The amount raised annually by taxation upon the people in several of the principal cities is as follows:—

New York ................................ $33,000,000 Boston .................................. 10,000,000 Cincinnati .............................. 3,000,000 Philadelphia ............................ 12,080,000 Chicago ................................. 4,000,000 New Orleans ............................. 1,800,000 Baltimore ............................... 4,100,000 Cleveland ............................... 1,800,000

With these facts and figures before us, is it any wonder we have hard times?—Christian Woman.