AN UNWARRANTED WASTE

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Feb 10, 1904

AN UNWARRANTED WASTE.

THE liquor traffic is wont to boast of the good it does in furnishing public funds through the licenses and taxes it pays and the number of people to whom it gives employment. Dr. Madison C. Peters, of New York, throws some light on this subject which is worthy of serious consideration by the people at large. Here are a few of his facts and conclusions, which give some idea of the financial losses sustained by the people through indulgence of the liquor incubus:—

The entire amount received for tariff is something like $150,000,000 a year. The total output of silver in this country is perhaps $65,000,000 a year; $1,000,000,000, it is reliably estimated, is the direct tribute which the people of the nation pay to the support of the liquor traffic. The ordinary expense of the United States Government for all of the departments, prior to the Spanish-American war, was less than $400,000,000 a year, so that the drink bill was three times the amount required to run the entire government of the United States.

Our drink bill is more than six times as large as our tariff revenue, and nearly sixteen times as great as the entire value of the silver product of the country.

One billion dollars turned from the saloons into the channels of legitimate trade would go far toward improving our industrial situation, for, notwithstanding our prosperity, the masses seem to be unhappy, and unknown numbers are suffering for the simplest necessities of life. Neither open mints nor open mills will do so much to abolish poverty, and insure general prosperity, as closed saloons.

If the money which the wage-workers of this country spent in the saloons during the last ten years had been invested in railroad stocks and bonds, it would have transferred the ownership of every single mile of railway in the United States to the laboring classes who squander their wages in drink.

Of every ten dollars spent for shoes, tracing them back through the factory to the tannery, about three dollars go to the farmer to pay for his hides, and about three dollars to the tannery and shoemakers; but out of the ten dollars spent for beer and whisky, only about one dollar goes to the farmer for his grain, and less than fifty cents to the man who produces the liquor.

More capital is invested and less labor employed in the liquor industry than in any other in the country. For every dollar the brewer and distiller pay the farmer for his grain, there would be at least thirty dollars paid him by those who consumed his products in other forms.