A tract-man handed me several leaflets, from which I culled the following:
“The drink bill of Great Britain annually amounts to one hundred and forty million pounds sterling. This is about five pound sterling per head of the inhabitants. It is estimated that sixty per cent. of this, or eighty-four millions, comes out of the wages of the working classes. There are one million six hundred thousand acres in England cultivated for barley and fifty thousand for hops. Seventy million bushels of grain are worse than wasted in manufacturing drink. Allowing forty pounds of flour to a bushel, and sixty pounds of bread, the total would be one billion and fifty million, four pound loaves, or one hundred and seventy loaves for each family of five persons throughout the United Kingdom. In twenty-five years there have been four million two hundred and sixty-eight thousand and twenty-two arrests of drunk and disorderlies, and probably not one in twenty of the drunkards arrested. There are one million forty thousand, one hundred and three paupers in England and Wales, or one in nineteen of the whole population, nine-tenths caused by drink. There are one hundred and forty thousand criminals, mostly owing to drink, and twenty-five thousand policemen required to keep public houses in order and protect life and property; forty-three thousand lunatics in the asylums. In England, one in every one hundred and seventy of the total population is convicted of drunkenness.”
Lord Chief Justice Coleridge states that nine out of every ten gaols would be closed but for drink. Justice Fitzgerald says that drunkenness leads to nineteen-twentieths of the crimes; Mr. Mulhall, that forty-eight per cent. of the idiocy in England arises from the drunkenness of the parents, and one-third of the insanity in the United Kingdom is the effect of drink; Sir James Horner, that seventy-five out of every hundred of the divorce cases are brought about by drink; Mr. Gladstone, that drink has caused greater calamities than the three great historical scourges, war, famine and pestilence.
A distinguished English writer says that, “the poverty of the poor is the chief cause of the weakness and inefficiency which are the causes of their poverty, dire poverty and the frequency of public houses act and react upon one another, poverty increasing public houses, and public houses increasing poverty.”
A Government report shows that it costs five and three quarter millions sterling a year for the repression of crime in England, and while they spend one hundred and forty millions sterling a year for drink, the British spend only two millions a year on books.
With such facts, showing the waste of food, the unnatural bill of costs and the inevitable losses caused by the demoralization of the people, can any one doubt the cause of the squalid poverty of the masses of Great Britain?
And it is a civilized Christian nation that tolerates and encourages such things!
Further, it found heathen India sober, and it is doing its best to make it a nation of drunkards like itself, by means of liquor and opium. An Archdeacon who has spent thirty years in India makes the statement that for every convert to Christianity made by the missionaries, the Government makes one thousand drunkards.
Another item. The United Kingdom has 330 packs of fox hounds, at a yearly cost of £414,850. The 33,000 riders and 99,000 horses cost £3,500,000, or the whole hunt maintenance at £4,000,000 a year, to keep up a cruel, inhuman, degrading sport. Most likely all who uphold this waste of money and cruelty were confirmed in the church as Christians, and partake regularly of “holy communion” as followers of Jesus, while several millions of their fellow beings go naked and hungry. What a grim satire on profession and practice!
While I hate the opium business in India, I cannot but think that with such an appalling record as the above, that the people “at home” would better cleanse their own filthy door-yards before criticising those of India. Would it not be more consistent, more honest, more commendable, if the English people would do away with their greatest curse, their liquor traffic, and look after their paupers, criminals, and the brutally oppressed innocent victims, the wives and children of drunkards, and all this damnable encouragement of vice, before they send out junketing commissions at an enormous expense on the poor, overtaxed serfs of India, to investigate the opium traffic?