The total cost of alcoholic drinks each year is eight times that spent for education. The saloon-keepers outnumber the ministers of the gospel four to one. Sixty thousand people die annually from alcohol.
Those who use alcohol are very liable to disease. In Russia the cholera swept off one year every drinking person in a certain town before it affected a single temperate one. In New Orleans, five thousand drinking men died one season from yellow fever before it touched a sober one. In 1832, in Park Hospital, New York, out of 204 cases of cholera, only six were men of temperate habits; these all recovered, while 122 of the others died.
Sir John Ross, the famous Arctic explorer, never used alcohol or tobacco. On one of his voyages, when a youth, every one of the crew that was a drinker, died; but he himself was not sick a single hour. When exploring the frozen regions, he was an old man, the oldest of his crew being twenty years younger than he. His men used tobacco and spirits, but he went without either; and with his advanced years, stood the rigors and hardships better than any of them.
At a recent meeting of surgeons and officers of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company to arrange for medical and surgical supplies to be placed on trains and at each station on the road, the question of adding alcoholic stimulants to the supplies was at once rejected; some of the surgeons claiming that in case of shock from injury, it was worthless.
Intoxication leads a person to do that which he would not do when sober if he dared. It therefore takes away the self-restraint that is the safeguard of society.
One of the greatest mistakes of the young is the belief that a person can drink a little beer, cider, wine or liquor now and then, without danger to himself. No one ever began drinking with the belief that he would die a drunkard; he meant to drink when he felt like it with his friends, but was sure he could stop when he chose.
Even if a person were able to keep to a moderate use of alcohol all his life, his brain and nervous system would become diseased. When epidemics visit any place, the first persons to die, as I have shown, are those accustomed to drink liquor.
Poisonous as is alcohol to the body, it is more fatal to the mind and heart. It clouds the brain, dwarfs and blots out the good impulses, and increases the power of the passions and the baser side of our nature.