WHERE THE DIMES GO by Sunday Afternoon

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Jul 22, 1889

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 15, No. 28.

WHERE THE DIMES GO.

By Sunday Afternoon

ASIDE from the moral view of the question, any sensible man or woman can see what a heavy drag the drinking habit is, on the prosperity of the drinker, the community, and the nation.

It is estimated that but fifteen per cent. of the young men of this country attend church with any regularity, that only five per cent. are church members, and that seventy-five per cent. never go to church at all. The attendance of young men at church, prayer-meeting, or Sunday-school is very small indeed. On the other hand the countless saloons, billiard-rooms, dance-halls, and other even worse places of vice, that are to be found in all our towns and cities, depend for their support almost entirely upon the patronage of young men. Our jails and reformatory institutions are full of young men. In one house of correction in a Western city, the records show 1,773 inmates, 1,172 of whom were young men between the ages of sixteen and thirty-two. In an Eastern State penitentiary, where there are no boys, the average age of its 1,900 inmates is less than twenty-four years.

The cost to a certain county of trying and convicting one of these criminals (twenty-six years old), was over $10,000; and upon another $30,000 was expended before he was executed. To maintain the liquor saloons of the United States—a prominent agency for ruining young men—over $900,000,000 annually, or $2,000,000 daily, are expended.—Sunday Afternoon.