The Kenosha telegraph. [volume] (Kenosha, Wis.) 1860-1888, 1885-03-20

the United States spent their money as
follows:
Carpets .......................... $sl,0o0ooO
Worsted goods ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. 100000
Wooden goods. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT. 160,000.000
Cotton goods. Observation-Disclosures. 210,O00,000
Boots and Observation-Disclosures 96.GO0.O00
All textiles. 437 100000
Articles of wear. 2,000, 900
Tea, coffee etc. Observation-Disclosures. I35 O0d,00e
Butter and cheese. 1S6.000,OO0
Sugar Observation-Disclosures. 234 100000
Bread or wheat flower. ........... 500, 000.O0G
All foods. .....-.........-....s 600
Wages paid in mechanical and man
ufacturing industries. .......... 947,000,000
Intoxicating drinks. $94z. OOO. 900
Do you comprehend those figures? Do
you comprehend the horrible fact that
rum costs the country every wear al
most as much as all the foods COM
Eined, that its sum total is almost as
great as that paid in wages, that it alb
serbs more of the productive industry
of the people than some dozens of the
necessaries of life combined?
And when you have figured up this
enormous cost you are not more than
half tt rough with it When the capi-
talist has put his money into house,
and the drunken tenant does not pay,
the loss of rent is a subtraction from
the just earnings of capital When the
victim of the brewer becomes incapable
of labor. in whole or in part, his en-
forced idleness is that much robbed
from the wealth of the country The
cost of the crme and pauperism of the
country, the expensive police system.
the enormous expense of courts, peni-
tentiaries, jails, houses of correction
and other reformatories, ninety per cent.
of this is TO be charged directly to rum.
Add to thee figures the indirect cost
and the sum total is almost beyond the
power of the mind to grasp.
Do you doubt the correctness of these
figures? Their correctness is easily as
certajnable.
The city of Toledo has about $4,000
population. There are in the city 500,
rum mills and beer shops, of all grades
that are recognized. This does not in
clude the numberless places where liq-
uors are sold to families, by the bottle
or case, but the so-called saloons, houses
of prostitution and gambling dons, all
of which live directly by intoxicants,
nor does it include the respectable
wholesalers who supply these places for
profit.
Its impossible for any one of them
to live upon less than daily sales of $40;
indeed, their average is long way
beyond that. Some of them do bust
ness of hundreds of dollars per day,
and they are open every day in the
year. Averaging them, for convenience,
at SO day, and each one does bus
mess of So, 655 per annum. Multiply
that by 800, and you have a sum total
of 50, 920, cooper annum.
Actually it is long way above that
1t is entirely safe to say that Toledo
pays every year the enormous sum of
SO, 500, 900 for liquors alone.
Toledo, be it borne in mind, is not
especially rum and beer-ridden city.
Il is not so bad in this respect in pro-
portion to population as Chicago or
Philadelphia, the latter supporting
forty miles of doggeries, allowing each
one to have frontage of twenty-five
feet. And you will notice that this
average keeps up in places of all sizes.
The county town of 5000 population
averages, as a.rule, only trife below
the larger cities. But the figures given
as to the total of the trade in intoxicants
in the whole country are official and not
to be disputed.
How is this terrible incubus ON the
industry of the country to be stopped?
Have we the right to invoke the power
of the law to stop itP Decidedly we
have. We have the right to meet force
with force The brewers and distillers
are organized to increase the consump-
ton OF their ro'sons. They are not CON
tent with natural demand, but they
are at work day and night to force de-
mand. They are organized to debauch
men and boys, to the end of increasing
their sales. They do not wait for sa-
looms to he established, but they 90 out
to select the places and furnish the
means to establish them. They are
making an aggressive fight upon good
morals, they are waging an unremitting
and never ending war upon sobriety,
and are succeeding beyond even their
expectations They are multiplying sa-
looms until cities are blotched with
them and the country districts as we'll
Beer is no longer a passive nuisance
it has become an aggressive evil
Toledo Blade.