One Cause of Hard Times

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Dec 17, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 48.

One Cause of Hard Times.

The Boston Traveler says: "It is the overconsumption of whisky that makes the underconsumption of food and clothing in this land of liberty and liquor. The annual bill for bread, meat, and cotton and woolen goods of this great American people foots up a total of about $1,250,000,000. But its annual bill for whisky, beer, and the taxes thereon, is $1,400,000,000. In other words, it drinks $150,000,000 worth more than it eats and wears. And the people who commit this folly every year are amazed that once in a few years they are hard up, and some of them want to hoist the communistic red flag, and destroy everybody else's property because they have wasted their own share of the national substance in rye juice and other riotous fluids."