Temperance | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · May 15, 1884

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 10, No. 19.

Temperance.

A Startling Statement.

THE Chicago Journal after remarking that statistics in the national census bureau show that, in round numbers, $750,000,000 is yearly spent in the United States for intoxicating liquors, and that that amount "would rebuild Chicago three times every year, better and more magnificently then she stands to-day," proceeds to say:—

But the cost of liquor-drinking is not altogether in money; it costs immensely in other directions and entails injuries and heartaches that are quite beyond the figures of the arithmetic accurately to compute. Four-fifths of all the inmates of our jails, prisons, penitentiaries, and reformatories are brought there, directly or indirectly, by strong drink. There are 500,000 of these whisky criminals in the United States to-day; every institution that is open for their reception is full of them, and the number is rapidly increasing. Then there are 800,000 insane persons, idiots, helpless inebriates, and paupers in the poor-houses and charitable institutions of the country, costing the tax-payers $100,000,000 per annum.

But this is not all. Much of the criminality, especially street brawls and murders, which costs the public so much money, is directly traceable to this one parent vice of drinking too much.

Nor is this all. No pen but the recording angel's is able truthfully to portray the sorrow that is inflicted upon loving hearts by this infernal habit of drinking stimulants. No class is so high in the social scale that it is not dragged down by it, and no class is so poor and degraded that it is not made more inhuman and miserable by it. A drunken parent bestows a curse upon his offspring, even to the third and fourth generations. Science shows how vice of any kind vitiates the blood, and, although it may skip one generation, it is certain to crop out farther down the stream. A dead drunkard often reaches out his hand from the grave, and, with his skeleton fingers, palsies the brain of his descendants, and sends them, like so many jabbering idiots, to the insane asylum to be supported by charity.

No. The liquor traffic must be characterized as an unmixed curse, viewed from any standpoint whatever, and as such it does not pay.—Kankakee Gazette.