Why Are The Times Hard?

What we desire to show is that, with an annual expenditure of $600,000,000 for liquors in the United States, and as the figures we give are based upon official statistics, it is not to be wondered at that the times are hard and people poor. Not only is this vast sum wasted; not only is the capital invested divorced from good uses, and all the industry involved in production taken from beneficent pursuits; but health, morality, respectability, industry and life are destroyed. Sixty thousand Americans annually lie down in a drunkard's grave. It were better to bring into the field and shoot down sixty thousand of our young men every year, than to have them go through all these processes of disease and crime.

With six hundred millions of money saved to the country annually, how long would it take to make these United States rich not only, but able to meet, without disturbance and distress, the revulsions in business to which all nations are liable? Here is a question for the statesman and politician. Twenty-five years of absolute abstinence from the consumption of useless and worse than useless liquors would save the country fifteen billions of dollars, and make us the richest nation on the face of the globe. Not only this sum, beyond the imagination to comprehend, would be saved, but all the abominable consequences of misery, disease, disgrace, crime and death that would grow from the consumption of such an enormous amount of poisonous fluids, would be saved.

And yet temperance men are looked upon as disturbers and fanatics! And we are adjured not to bring temperance into politics! And this great transcendent question of economy gets the go-by, while [...] for the sake of [...] and of office! Do we not desert [...]?