“In New York, Mr. Greeley states that ‘a much larger proportion of adult males in the state drink now than did in 1840-44.’ After speaking of the adverse demonstrations all over the country, he adds, ‘I cannot recall a single decisive, cheering success, to offset these many reverses.’
“Massachusetts is moving to build an asylum for her twenty-five thousand drunkards. Lager beer brewers at Boston Highlands have three millions of dollars invested in the business, manufactured four hundred and ninety-five thousand barrels last year, and paid a tax of half a million to the general government. The city of Chicago, last year, received into her treasury one hundred and ten thousand dollars for the sale of indulgences to sell intoxicating drinks.
“The same rate of fearful expenditure for intoxicating drinks extends across the ocean. In a speech before the Trades’ Union Congress, last October, at Birmingham, ‘on the disorganization of labor,’ Mr. Potter shows drunkenness to be the great disorganizer of the labor of Great Britain, at a yearly cost of two hundred and twenty-eight million pounds, equal to one billion one hundred and forty million dollars; enough,” he adds, “to pay the public debt of Great Britain in less than five years, and greatly diminish taxation forever.”
How they live.
In one block near the New Bowery, New York, are huddled fifteen hundred and twenty persons. Eight hundred and twelve are Irish, two hundred and eighteen Germans, one hundred and eighty-nine Poles, one hundred and eighty-six Italians, thirty-nine Negroes, sixty-four French, two Welsh, only ten American. Of these, ten hundred and sixty-two are Catholic, two hundred and eighty-seven Jews, etc. There are twenty grog-shops and fifty degraded women. Of six hundred and thirteen children, but one hundred and sixty-six went to school.
New York city consumes nine thousand six hundred dollars’ worth of flour a day (twelve hundred barrels), and uses ten thousand dollars’ worth of tobacco per day.
Old Age.
We have mentioned some physicians who lived to an extreme old age—the Doctors Meade; one lived to be one hundred and forty-eight years and nine months. Thomas Parr, an English yeoman, lived to the remarkable age of one hundred and fifty-three years; and even then Dr. Harvey, who held a post mortem on the body, found no internal indication of decay. One of his descendants lived to be one hundred and twenty. The Rev. Henry Reade, Northampton, England, reached the age of one hundred and thirty-two.
There was a female in Lancashire, whose death was noticed in the Times, called the “Cricket of the Hedge,” who lived to be one hundred and forty-one years, less a few days. The Countess Desmond arrived at the remarkable age of one hundred and forty years.
One might suppose the allotted threescore and ten years a sufficiently long time to satisfy one to live in poverty in this world; but Henry Jenkins lived and died at the age of one hundred and sixty-nine years, in abject penury. He was a native of Yorkshire, and died in 1670.