Wives for Bar Keepers

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Jan 16, 1879

Wives for Bar Keepers.

A singular suggestion was that of a Mr. Campbell in a temperance lecture in Maysville, Ky. It ought to set every bar-room tippler to thinking. He said:—

Bar-rooms are not kept for amusement. There is not a man in the State who would keep a bar if there was no hope for a profit. Let every man who has brains enough to attend to his business determine not to drink at a bar, and the bar-rooms will soon be closed. Men who are ashamed of their habits of drinking, and who must have a screen to hide them, will not often have an opportunity to drink elsewhere, and one great step in the temperance reform will have been taken. Bar keepers in this city pay, on an average, $2 per gallon for whisky. One gallon contains an average of sixty-five drinks, and at ten cents a drink the poor man pays $6.50 per gallon for his wiskey. In other words he pays $2 for the whisky and $4.50 to a man for handing it over a bar. While it would be better for all not to drink, some men will have whisky, and my advice to them is this: Make your wife your bar keeper. Lend her $2 to buy a gallon of whisky for a beginning, and every time you want a drink go to her and pay her ten cents for it. By the time you have drank a gallon she will have $6.50, or enough money to refund the $2 borrowed of you, to pay for another gallon of liquor, and have a balance of $4.50. She will be able to conduct future operations on her own capital, and when you become an inebriate, unable to support yourself, shunned and despised by respectable people, your wife will have enough money to keep you until you get ready to fill a drunkard's grave. But had you paid all this money to a bar keeper, he would not have given a cent to bury you, or a crust of bread to keep your children from starving.