The Drink Traffic.

Feilding Star, Volume XVII, Issue 252, 29 April 1896, Page 2

The Drink Traffic.

Colonial Bain, a Kentuckian orator in a recent lecture on 'Our National Sins,' said : Iv the last twenty-five years the consumption of liquor in this country has increased from ' seven gallons per capita to seventeen gallons per capita, and yet not a statesman nor a newspaper has ever alluded to that enormous expense as one of the causes of tbe bard times. Win. C "Whitney says that the hard times were caused by too much silver and too much tariff. All the silver in the country would not pay the nations drink bill for a year, and all tbe tariff collected for a year would not pay the country's drink bill for 120 days. Talk about our standing annies — the expense ofthe standing armies in Germany, France, Spain, and Russia does not equal what this country pays for drink. They say that if you wipe out the liquor traffic you would deprive the men engaged in it of employment. The liquor traffic in this country 'employs 400,000 men. This same amount of capital in any other industry would employ 2,500,000 men. This is a question for working meu. What labor spends for liquor in sixty days would buy out the whole Pullman Palace Car Company. So if instead of goinj? on a strike a year ago they had just quit drinking for sixty days they could have bought out the whole company. There is nothing so fraught with magnificent results as this problem. Take out every saloon and and pnt a school in its place, take out every distillery and put a church in its place, take out every brewery and put a W.C.T.U. in its place, and this would soon be tbe wealthiest and most prosperous nation on the face of the earth. Now for every dollar we spend for schools we spend ten for saloons, and for every dollar we spend on churches ten for saloons. The whole system is a chain. The drunkard is linked to the saloon, the saloon is linked to the license, the license is linked to the license legislator, and the license legislator is linked to the voter -probably some Christian on his way to Heaven. But the other end of the chain is going the other way. The liquor question can never be settled till it is settled right. Like slavery, it must be wiped out altogether." — 'Christian Observer.