Vermont watchman and State journal. [volume] (Montpelier, Vt.) 1836-1883, 1877-05-23
The Cost of Dissipation.

Not the least of the evils resulting from
dissipation and incorporate habits, is thei
costliness. 1t is not only that the Ameri
can people pay hundreds of millions annually
for the worse than useless luxury of drinl
ITSELF but those who do not drink, as well as
those who do, must subtract from theil
earnings certain sum every year, to pay
for the sad results of drink to keep the
police courts in motion to keep the iails
and state prisons doing their work to main
tain alms-houses; to support reformatory
institutions; topay judges and jury in count
less suits of the states prosecution of crime
A large percentage of these expenses, vari
ously estimated at from one-half to nine.
tenths, is the result of intemperance, so that
large share of our taxation goes to a poor
and unavailing attempt to repair the dam.
ages of the drinking-shops. The statistics
of crime are as sensitive to drink as the
needle to magnetic currents. A thermome-
ter does not register heat more accurately
than the tables of crime respond to the
drinking habits of the people and the cost
of crime and pauperism, and vice and sick
ness, as the result of intemperance, is hardly
properly estimated.
Suppose the five hundred millions spent
on drink in this country every year were
spent in converting the world to the Chris
tian religion, or works of art for the national
and state capitals, or in scientific and liter
ary lectures, concerts, and libraries made
free to the poor; or that all the money spent
in courts of law, on police, on iails on aims
houses, on prisons, on prosecutions for all
kinds of crime, on inebriate asylums and re-
formatory institutions, on the care of orphans
and neglected children, and all the other
public expenses which are the direct result
OF drink, were expended to put library and
newspaper in every mans home, and TO
endow our institutions of learning so that
they should be free of all tax on parents, or
expense to students; or suppose that all the
time wasted in dram-shops, all the time lost
by the shortening of life through intemper-
ance-in short suppose that all the vigor of
mind and body wasted on drink could be
gathered up and devoted to honest industry,
and the purchase and adornment of homes
for those who are now in want through i'm
providence and drink, would not our world
be a different world from what it is to-day
What the country needs is money. We
want money; we want it for institutions of
learning, for our public buildings, for edu-
cation, for works of art, for the instruction
of the emigrant population, for the work of
Christianizing the hordes of European and
Asiatic peasants who are nocking into the
great West, Gas doves to their windows be-
fore a storm = but if we spend money on
and crime, on things that are a
constant disgrace, we cannot have it to ex-
pend on the higher things of health, culture,
and religion. The country, rich as it seems
to be, and wonderful as are its resources,
cannot produce wealth fast enough to do
both these things. The country needs money
Money is accumulated by honest industry
by this and nothing else. Paper is not
money; industry is money. But if industry
is impaired by the national intemperance if
the wages of industry go, not to improve
homes, but into the till of the dram-shop,
and the bar of the village tavern, and one
half of all our taxation for city, county and
state taxes goes to care for the poverty
stricken and criminal classes-made pau
pers and criminals by drink then for the
things we need and the things it is a shame
to us not to have, we must either continue
to need them and go without them, or bor-
row the money, and mortgage the hand of
industry, for two or three generations, to
pay Tor them, even as we are doing at the
most rapid rate ever before seen in the his
tory of any people.-Traviers Record.