Drink and Dollars

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Sep 1, 1914

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 41, No. 34.

Drink and Dollars

Some Striking Figures

THE people of the United States—practically, one third of the people of the United States—consume more than TWO AND ONE EIGHTH BILLION GALLONS of intoxicants yearly, at a cost of more than TWO BILLION DOLLARS. (See “America’s Drink Bill.”)

You can’t grasp these figures. No man can. One million is a thousand thousand. One billion is a thousand million. Two billion is two thousand million.

Counting at the rate of one hundred a minute, ten hours a day, three hundred days in a year, it would take more than fifty-five years to count a billion.

If the vast sum spent for liquor were in silver dollars, packed one upon another, ten to the inch, it would make a pile 3,156 miles high.

If these dollars were laid side by side, they would make a row 47,500 miles long, reaching almost twice around the earth.

If these dollars were melted down, they would make a block of silver weighing 58,967 tons. Carrying one hundred pounds to the load, five miles a day—as far as a man would care to carry such a burden—it would take one hundred thousand liquor men more than eleven days to convey the mass that distance.

If these dollars were in gold, they would weigh 7,711,058 pounds, or more than 3,855 tons.

Do we understand any better what the liquor traffic means?

That colossal sum of over Two Billion Dollars would give 1,000,000 young men $2,000 each to help them get an education.

That Two Billion Dollars would build 1,000,000 schoolhouses at $2,000 each.

It would build 500,000 churches at an average cost of $4,000.

It would build a great city capable of housing comfortably 400,000 persons.

THAT TWO BILLION DOLLARS WOULD BUILD, AT A COST OF $20,000 TO THE MILE, TWENTY LINCOLN BOULEVARDS ACROSS THE CONTINENT FROM THE ATLANTIC TO THE PACIFIC, AND WOULD PLACE UPON THESE GREAT HIGHWAYS 800,000 AUTOMOBILES AT AN AVERAGE COST OF $1,000 A CAR.

Think of this great country with such vast improvements as that. Yet the drink bill for one year—what men pay for intoxicating liquors in retail—would build these twenty highways and place upon them these 800,000 machines.

But all the tramps in the land, all the unemployed, could not do the work.

HARD TIMES! The curse and the cause of hard times is in the liquor traffic.

The drink bill for one year in the United States alone would put $1.25 into the hands of every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth, black and white, brown and red and yellow.

The drink bill would do a thousand and one other things that would bring blessing and work and prosperity to the laboring man.

Why can not sensible men see that it would be of immense value to the country, to the nation, to the people, economically, socially, mentally, and morally, to wipe out the curse of alcohol forever?

The country owes the traffic nothing. The traffic owes humanity an infinite debt, which it can never repay.

The very best thing that can be done for the victims that survive is to abolish it forever.