ECONOMIC EFFECTS 313 



alcohol, it became the old story of an uncontrollable 

 appetite. This applies to the millionaires and the sons of 

 the same who have the means to gratify their wants, and 

 do so till their systems refuse, when mania and death 

 follow as well as to the gutter-snipe who burns for rum 

 and dies the death of a neglected drunkard. Sum levels 

 them both and affects them in the same way here and 

 hereafter. The curse is in the abuse, but the man, as a 

 rule who is abusing the use of it, does not consider that it 

 applies to himself, but to the other fellow, and will 

 sympathize, and sometimes remonstrate with him in his 

 being a slave to drink. ' ' x 



Economic effects. If the effects of alcohol were lim- 

 ited to physical and moral degeneration, the spectacle 

 would be pitiable enough, but it further brings eco- 

 nomic evils in its train. The expense connected with its 

 use is enormous. The sums of money spent in buying 

 it, although amounting to hundreds of millions yearly, 

 are yet but a small item in the final bill of costs against 

 it. In that must be reckoned the diminished or even 

 destroyed earning power of those who use it, which, if 

 it could be reckoned, would be beyond belief. To its 

 account must also be charged a proportion of the cost 

 of maintaining poorhouses, courts, reformatories and 

 prisons, which are necessitated in part by the crimes 

 committed under its influence. If alcohol could be abol- 

 ished from the world and this immense sum of money 

 spent for the families of its present victims, the world 

 would have made a marvellous step toward the elimina- 

 tion of misery and crime and the development of a more 

 uniformly wholesome, strong and intelligent race. 



1 The Physiological Aspects of the Liquor Problem, Committee 

 of Fifty. 



