America’s Drink Tank

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

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

America’s Drink Tank

The people of the United States consume the following quantities of intoxicating liquors:

Distilled spirits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135,951,410 gallons Imported spirits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3,544,921 gallons Domestic wines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50,619,880 gallons Imported wines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5,804,831 gallons Domestic malt liquors . . . . . . . . . . . 1,925,361,507 gallons Imported malt liquors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7,169,677 gallons

The total number of gallons is 2,128,452,226. So declares the “World Almanac and Encyclopedia” for 1914.

Think of it—more than two billion gallons poured down the throats of the drinkers! This does not include “moonshine” whisky, “near beer,” nor other illegal concoctions. If put together in one receptacle, these liquors would fill a vat five feet deep, five feet wide, and 2,150 miles long. It would reach from San Francisco to Chicago. Allowing two feet to each person, 5,675,872 men and women could stand on each side—11,351,744 in all—and look down into its turbid depths. If all were gifted with keen imagination and X-ray sight, they could not begin to see the wrecks of homes and hearts; the debased manhood and womanhood; the dead bodies of slain victims; the yet living and dying, struggling in a grasp which grips stronger than the treacherous quicksands; the eternally ruined hopes; the unutterable wo; the dark despair,—the horrors of the hell of that tank of poison. Reader, would you not like to destroy it forever, and put out of commission the stills and vats and brews that keep it filled? So many might be saved! Are you not willing to help?