The Cost | AdventAI

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

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 12, No. 26.

The Cost.

THE Evening Journal, Chicago, quotes the return of the census showing that $700,000,000 are spent yearly in the United States for intoxicating drink, and adds: 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 to accurately compute. Four-fifths of all the inmates of our jails, 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. 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 finger, palsies the brain of his descendants, and sends them, like so many jabbering idiots, to the insane asylum to be supported by charity.—Sel.