The MORAL LOSS is not confined to the direct influence of the brutalizing poison. The liquor traffic defiles all participants of a transaction which involves a sin against Nature, a crime against society and posterity, and an outrage against the moral instincts of the veriest savage, for more than five thousand years ago the lawgivers of the Bactrian nomads[6] recorded their protest against the vice of intoxication. A drunkard who flees from the prohibitory laws of his native place can not escape the voice of an inner monitor. The liquor dealer who points to his license is not the less conscious that he is an enemy of mankind, and that his servants eat the wages of a soul and body corrupting vice. The lawgiver who can be bribed to connive at that vice not only sins against the laws of political economy, but against Nature and the first principles of natural ethics, and forfeits his claim to the respect of the community. Faith in the sanctity of the law, in the wisdom and integrity of the legislator, is the very corner-stone of public morals, but that faith is incompatible with a system of legalized crime, and the lawgiver who consents to sanction the outrage of the poison traffic undermines the basis of his authority, and thereby the authority of the law itself. It is wholly certain that larceny and perjury combined do not damage the state the hundredth part as much as the curse of the poison vice; yet what should we think of the moral status of a legislative assembly devising a plan to increase the national revenues by granting license to pickpockets and professional false witnesses? Imagine a Titus Oates[7] offering his services on the public streets, and a chief justice compelling the courts to recognize the legality of his business, and protect him in the enjoyment of its emoluments! Imagine Jack Sheppard[8] filching the weekly wages of a half-witted working man, and flaunting a government license if the wife of his victim should demand the restitution of the plunder. The absurdity of such an arrangement might seem too glaring to imagine its possibility. Yet for the same reason posterity may refuse to credit the records of our liquor system; for, translated into plain speech, the contract between the state and the rum vender means even this: “On condition of receiving a share in the yearly profits of your business, I herewith grant you the right to poison your fellow-citizens.”
The LOSS OF WEALTH, which some of the foregoing considerations will enable us to estimate, has increased with the progress of our national development in a way which in many respects has made that progress a curse instead of a blessing. Thirty-five years ago our brethren in Maine had a hard fight against the champions of the liquor traffic, but they had to deal with whiskey alone. Since then our foreign immigrants have introduced ale, lager beer, and French high wines, and threaten to introduce absinthe[9] and opium. The poison vice has assumed the magnitude of a pandemic plague. According to the statistics of the Treasury Department, the alcohol drinkers of the United States spent during the last ten years a yearly average of $370,000,000 for whiskey, $53,000,000 for other distilled liquors, $56,000,000 for wine, and $140,000,000 for ale and beer. Together, $624,000,000 a year. Under the head of liquors evading the revenue tax, Prof. W. Hoyle, of Manchester, adds 20 per cent. for Great Britain, Commissioner Halliday 15 per cent. for the United States, and Dr. Bowditch 18 per cent. for the state of Massachusetts alone. Let us assume the minimum of 15 per cent. The total direct cost of the poison vice (without including tobacco and other narcotic stimulants) is therefore $705,000,000 a year. The indirect cost eludes computation, except under the three following heads: 1. The loss of productive capacity, as revealed in the difference between the yearly earnings of a manufacturing community under the protection of prohibitory laws or under the influence of the license system. 2. The inebriate percentage of patients in our public hospitals, and of convicts in our prisons. 3. The loss sustained by the employers of agents, trustees, clerks, etc., addicted to the use of intoxicating liquors. The aggregate of these indirect losses we will assume to be only $350,000,000 a year, though several political economists compute it as equal to the direct cost. Our estimate does not include the amount of rum-begotten distress relieved by private charity, nor the rum percentage of undetected crime, nor yet the wholly incalculable value of the benefactions, reforms and improvements prevented by the use of intoxicating liquors among the upper classes. We can therefore be quite sure of understating the truth if we estimate the aggregate cost of the poison vice at $1,055,000,000 a year—a yearly sum equivalent to the cost value of all our public libraries, our church property, school property, steamboats, bridges, and telegraphs taken together.
Prohibition would put a stop to one half of that prodigious waste. We will not delude ourselves with the hope that the deep-rooted habit of the stimulant vice could at once be wholly eradicated by any legislative measures whatever. For years to come 20 per cent. of the aggregate would undoubtedly be devoured by liquor venders finding means to elude the vigilance of the law. Fifteen per cent. would be spent on other vices. Fifteen per cent. more would probably be wasted for frivolous purposes—innocent, as compared with the crime of the poison traffic, but still on the whole amounting to a loss of national resources. The waste of the remaining fifty per cent. could be prevented by prohibition. In ten years the saving of that sum and its application to useful purposes would transform the moral and physical condition of our country. With five billion dollars we could construct ten bridges over every one of our hundred largest rivers. We could build an international railroad of a gauge that would enable the denizens of snow-bound New England to reach the tropics in twenty-four hours. We could realize Professor Lexow’s project of providing every large city with a system of free municipal railways connecting the centers of commerce with the suburban homes of the workingmen. We could make those suburbs attractive enough to drain the population of the slums. We could counteract the temptations of the grog-shops by providing the poor with healthier means of recreation; city parks with free baths, competitive gymnastics and zoölogical attractions for the summer season, and reading rooms with picture galleries and musical entertainments for the long winter evenings. We could employ home missionaries enough for a direct appeal to every fallen or tempted soul in the country. We could cover our hillsides with orchards and line our highways with shade trees; we could plant forest trees enough to redeem thousands of square miles in the barren uplands of the West. Each township in the country could have a free school, each village a free public library; we could help the sick by teaching them to avoid the causes of disease; we could prevent rather than punish crime; we could teach our homeless vagrants the lessons of self-support, and found asylum colonies for the lost children of our great cities. And moreover, we could increase the savings of the next decade by the endowment of a National Reform College, with a corps of competent sanitarians and political economists, for the training of temperance teachers, with local lecturers, traveling lecturers, and free lecture halls in every larger city of the country.
Only thus prohibition could be brought to answer its whole purpose, for we should remember that the practical efficiency of all government laws depends on the consensus of the governed. Without the coöperation of the teacher the mandates of the legislator fall short of their aim. But it is equally certain that in the field of social ethics the teacher can not dispense with the aid of the legislator, and that our lawgivers can not much longer afford to ignore that truth, for the penalty of the neglect already amounts to the equivalent of the average yearly income of seven million working people. In the South a million men, women and children of farm laborers earn less than a hundred millions a year, i. e., $500 for every family of five persons. In the manufacturing districts of the North they would earn less than $200,000,000. We can therefore again be wholly certain of not overstating the truth, if we assert that in the United States alone the poison vice devours every year the aggregate earnings of more than fourteen hundred thousand families. In one dollar bank-notes of the United States Treasury, one billion dollars could be pasted together into a paper strip that would reach up to the moon. Stacked up in bundles, they would form a paper pile a hundred feet long, fifty feet wide, and fifty feet high.
If the equivalent of so many creature-comforts could be employed for the benefit of the poor, it would almost realize the dreams of a Golden Age. But even if we could save it from the hands of the poison vender by burning it on the public streets, all friends of mankind would hail the conflagration as the gladdest bonfire that ever cheered the hearts of men. For its flames would save more human lives than the perpetual peace of the millennium; it would prevent more crimes than the civilization of all the savages that infest the prairies of our border states and the slums of our large cities. Nay, it would save us from evils for which mankind has thus far discovered no remedy, for intemperance robs us of blessings which human skill is unable to restore.
SUNDAY READINGS.
SELECTED BY CHANCELLOR J. H. VINCENT, D.D.