every woman and girl; for it is ever the feminine half of the world that suffers for the sins of the masculine half.
About this time, also, besides the labors of the clergymen already mentioned. Gov. Gibbs and H. H. Northup, of Portland, and Judge Greene of Olympia, expounded the laws relating to the granting of licenses, by the sufferance of the people-not a justification of the traffic that make one necessary. Such sufferance can at any moment be terminated, whenever the people declare that the nuisance, whatever it be, shall be abated.
The effect of alcohol upon the stomach and brain was ably expounded to large audiences by Dr. Watkins and Dr. Dickson, in very instructive and able lectures, showing conclusively that it furnishes no aliment to the system, and is never assimilated, but remains a foreign and undigested element, until the forces of the body at great expense of effort get rid of which it was clearly shown that a license is only the legal expression of it as best they can.
Other persons produced statistics to show the immense amount of grain and of capital consumed in the manufacture of intoxicating drinks; the almost incredible consumption of liquors, and the effect upon the morals and health of the nation. It was shown that from forty to ninety per cent. of arrests all over the Union are the result of liquor-drinking; that our prisons and poor-houses, and our lunatic asylums largely, also, are filled by the victims of drink. The conclusion was plain that the tax upon liquors which forms so important a source of revenue is offset by the cost to the people of supporting the machinery of criminal arrests, prosecutions, and punishments. In Portland is this especially true, where licenses bring the city a revenue of $13,000; while the cost of maintaining the police force, which is principally employed in taking charge of "drunk and disorderly" persons is $36,000. It was stated that it would take $6,000 support a saloon for one year. Portland supports sixty-five drinking-houses, which at that estimate would require $390,000 to keep them up. That large sum expended for a vice, would support the city government, and render comfortable all the poor families now suffering in consequence of the wrongful diversion of this money to illicit uses. And when it is considered how much money is spent at houses of ill-fame in this city, by those who but for the stimulant of drink would never degrade themselves by such associations, it is easy to compute something of what this abominable vice costs the city of Portland.
THE REAL SUFFERERS
And although men are the sinners in its vending and its use—with few exceptions—women and children are the sufferers. A man does not break his own heart by his drunkenness and debauchery; it is his wife's heart, or his mother's or his sister's, that suffers all the anguish of shame, of sorrow, or of despair. He wastes his fortune or his earnings; but his family suffers the loss; for in the insensibility of drunkenness he is conscious of no loss. He gives the blows and curses; they bear them; He loses his soul; they mourn over it.
What wonder then that like an electric spark, God's indication to women that he wished them to take up the work of overcoming this
