Wastes of the Liquor Traffic.
“The work of Dr. William Hargreaves, entitled ‘Our Wasted Resources,’” says Dr. Holland, “should be pondered by all politicians, political economists, and statesmen of our country.” It should be thoughtfully read, in fact, by every adult American man and woman in our land. “It is a marvelous revelation of criminal waste, the expenditure of almost incalculable resources for that which brings nothing but misery in return. In deference to those who are determined on drinking what they please, heedless utterly of the consequences of their example (on their sons and, now-a-days, also on their daughters and their wives), counting it no one’s business but their own, and who complain of all who oppose them as sham moralists whose advice they do not want and will not accept,—in deference to these, then, we drop it for the time as a moral question, and look at it merely as a question of national economy and prosperity. . . . “The liquor bill of Pennsylvania during 1870 was more than sixty-five millions of dollars, a sum equal to one-third of the entire agricultural product of the State. Besides which, in 1870, there were expended by liquor consumers more than one hundred and six millions of dollars, a sum that amounted to nearly all the wages paid to laborers in agriculture and manufactures, and nearly twice as much as the receipts of all the railroads in the State, the sum of the latter being between sixty-eight and sixty-nine millions, with an annual expenditure of six hundred millions of dollars for liquors in the United States; and all the figures we give are based upon official statistics. Not only is this vast sum wasted, not only is the capital invested diverted from good uses and the industry involved taken from beneficent pursuits, but health, morality, respectability, industry, and life destroyed. “Sixty thousand Americans annually are laid down in drunkards’ graves. It were better,” adds Dr. Holland, “to bring into the field and shoot down sixty thousand of our young men every year, than to have them go through all the processes of disease, degradation, crime, and despair, through which tremendous experience they now pass. “Six hundred millions of dollars saved to the country annually would make our United States not only rich but able to meet the revulsions in business to which all nations are liable, without a shadow of dismay. And twenty-five years of abstinence from this consumption of liquors would leave our country fifteen billions of dollars, and make us the richest nation on the face of the globe. Not only this sum—beyond the imagination to comprehend—would be saved, but all the misery of disease, degradation, crime, and death, with all their horrors, would be to us, not only unexperienced, but unheard of and unknown! “Should not an array of facts like these bring thousands on thousands of sane men to their feet, with sufficient energy, determination, and ability, to stamp out this ignominious, vile, and deadly usage from among us?”