Kirksville Democrat/1892/January/8/The Cost of Rum

by J. Howard Moore

Men and women stand before the Republic today and pencil the cost of drink. They paint the Niagara of dollars that month after month and year after year leaps into the great black man of appetite.

They compare it with the banks. They tell how in just nine months the whole banking capital of this country would be swept down this bottomless vortex. They show how the value of all the mines would be swallowed up in little over a twelve-month. How the mills and factories would go in four months, and the telegraphs in five. They picture shivering, starving thousands, thronging great cities, whose principal industry is the manufacture and barter of alcoholic flames. They tell how poverty and unrest prowl the land and caterwaul in the dark places of the Republic, while twenty-five hundred thousand dollars every day from January to December is burned up in worse than beastly lusts.

Thousands of such scorching truths pour incessantly from platform and pen, until it seems the syllables would blister on the frozen consciences of the people of this country. Yet, men look at the festering Diabolus, pinch nostrils, and like the Levite of old, pass by on the other side.

But appalling as they are, the finances of the rum scourge are infinitesimal!

If you would count the cost of rum, look not to the cash balance alone, for money is filth compared with the dearest interests of human existence. Consider the woeful train that follows this frightful outlay, if you would find the hideous total.

It ruins character, engenders vices of deepest dye; desolates homes, blights youth in its promise and woman's innocence; wrecks body and brain, crowds prisons, peoples poor-houses and mad asylums, demoralizes the ballot, bribes justice and legislation, breeds riots, assassinates law, poisons and debauches society—what has the abomination not done? It has been indicted for every offense in crime's black catalogue, and convicted on every count.

Sum up multiplied villainies! Count the cost of a human tear as it scalds down the cheek of agony, and multiply it by rivers! Count the cost of ruined homes and lives laid waste, multiply them by myriads and these into centuries! Count the cost of eternity in hell, and multiply it by millions!

Go ask the wife whose husband has squandered all in the saloon, as she sits today wailing among the weeds of disappointment—ask her what rum has cost! Ask the mother whose darling son has fallen victim to rum’s enticement, and instead of her once promising boy she beholds a besotted fiend, groveling in the gutter—ask her the cost of rum in the gilded mockery of trade! Ask the widow as she sits with streaming eyes at the close of a blasted life, and mourns for the days of happy girlhood! Ask the orphan that shivers and sobs on the stranger’s doorstep! Ask the maniac as he mutters in delirious hopelessness of the days when he was free! Ask the drunkard! Yes, ask the inebriate what rum has cost! Ask him in the reflective calm of soberness, when penitence claws at his conscience.

Ask him as he sits around the desolation of a drunkard’s doom, looks back over a blasted life and mourns for the might-have-been. Ask him on the couch of delirium tremens, when suspicion quivers ‘long every nerve.’ See him on that bed of torment with kindled hell in his soul! See him as he writhes and groans and grapples in his death agony. What slimy shapes crawl o’er his fevered limbs, or gibe at him from the blue corners of his chamber! What ghastly forebodings dance in the haunted hollows of his soul! What storms of horror rage along his imagination! What pangs shoot every sensory! What fiends stand by his midnight pillow!

Oh, if there is one thing on the wide earth that will freeze the blood in its hot cells, it is the mad inebriate in the last throes of dissolution.

******

Count the cost of rum if you would—yes, count it if you can—but count it not in the mockery of dollars! —J. Howard Moore, in Christian Evangelist.