Moderate Drinking by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Mar 19, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 12.

Moderate Drinking

By Editor

Moderate Drinking.—A correspondent to the San Francisco Examiner tells us what a "moderate drinker" of whisky is. He never gets intoxicated during business hours, and never gets so drunk that he does not know how to care for himself. He keeps whisky at his office and at the [he does not call it home], using in this way a gallon in a couple of months or more; but besides this he takes at a saloon from ten to twenty-five drinks a day. His moderate drinking he estimates costs him $53.00 a month, excluding Sundays. He pays this to what he calls "my whisky place," because of what it costs him. This is $636 a year, a total of $666 per annum to furnish a "moderate drinker" his whisky. He says that he never drinks so much but that he can distinguish "right from wrong." Does he give his wife one-third of that amount to spend? Does he do right here? Surely this man knows that whisky does him no good; that can be found out by comparison with his acquaintances who are total abstainers. Is it not a violation of a moral principle which will pour down a man's gullet, to satisfy a habit or appetite, from $600 to $700 a year, when there are so many demands in the great public need, to say nothing of one's own relatives? All intoxicating drinks are ultimately nerve stupefying, whether classed as stimulants or not. Can one partake continually of such poisons (toxins) and not become, in all the finer sensibilities of heart and soul, stupefied thereby?