A SAD WASTE by Joseph Clarke

Seventh-Day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Thursday, June 10, 1880

FromThe Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 55, No. 24

A SAD WASTE.

By Joseph Clarke

BY JOSEPH CLARKE.

It has been estimated that the loss to the United States through premature death, sickness, insanity, idiocy, pauperism, and crime, produced by the use of alcohol, is about one billion of dollars annually; and the cost of the liquor is equally great, making, in all, two billions of dollars yearly. If we add to this the cost of tobacco, opium, etc., we have an annual waste of at least two and a half billions, making in ten years an aggregate of twenty-five billions of dollars.

This is an expense for which there is no return; this it is that causes poverty and crime, and loads the country with unpaid mortgages and debts. Such a vast expenditure and waste affects the whole body politic; and like a profligate partner in a prosperous company, it will finally ruin the whole firm unless it is checked in its course.

Two billion dollars yearly amounts to twenty billions in ten years; this sum would buy twenty millions of farms at one thousand dollars each. Estimating the population of our country at forty millions and the number of families at ten millions, it would give each family two thousand dollars every ten years. No doubt this tremendous loss to the country is what is causing the great accumulation of public and private debts; and it is probably a fact that these numerous and ponderous individual and public debts are what give force to financial panics. These debts, municipal and of corporations, national debts and debts of counties and of States, all together, make an aggregate too large to contemplate without a shudder.

Suppose that for the next ten years this fearful waste might suddenly come to a pause, what a mighty change would take place. Or suppose that for the last eighty years all alcoholic liquors had been interdicted, and narcotics and stimulants had been laid aside; what would have been the effect? Now, instead of railroads being the property of money kings, they would, or might, be owned and controlled by the common people; and pauperism and crime would have been less than one-tenth what we now behold. Our people would have stronger and healthier bodies, and far more intelligent and better furnished minds; our schools and churches would have been much more numerous and effective.

But the flood of intemperance that is rolling over our land is a sad fact,—a terrible reality; and those who would do well are held in check by the evil course of those who drink, and those who deal in these soul-destroying beverages. The wicked make the debt and create the evil, and the good must help to foot the bill, and share in the curses which are entailed upon society by alcohol. The incendiary sets a house on fire, and is hanged to a lamp-post; but the capitalist manufactures and sells that which sets men on fire, and he is sent to Congress.

But worse than all is the fact that alcohol demoralizes a man, and makes him a brute, or a thief, or a murderer, or a man of violence ready for any crime, as the case may be. The inspired word tells us that drunkards shall not inherit the kingdom of God. The moderate drinker is a factor in the making of drunkards; his example tells in that direction; therefore, if he persists in moderate drinking, he throws his influence in the same channel with the drunkard, and must finally be ranked as an accessory in this Satanic work. I am sorry to say that there are churches and ministers in this enlightened country who think it no sin to keep alcoholic liquors on hand, and to drink them and furnish them to their friends. May God pity them.