Then Thomas J. spoke and brought up facts and figgers that nobody couldn’t git over, or crawl round; proved it right out, that intemperance caused more deaths than war, pestilence, and famine; that more than half the crimes committed in the United States could be traced back to drink; and eighty out of every hundred was helped on by it. And then he went on to tell how they transmitted the curse to their childern, and how, through its effects, infant babes was born drunkards, idiots, and criminals, entirely unbeknown to them; that the influence of our free schools is destroyed by the influence of the other free schools the nation allows for the childern of the people—the dram shops, and other legalized places of ruin—that while the cries of the starving and naked were filling our ears from all sides, seven hundred millions of dollars were annually spent for intoxicatin’ drink. Instead of spendin’ these millions for food and clothin’ for the perishin’, we spent them for ignorance, beastliness, taxation, crime, despair, madness and death. Says he: “The cost of likker-drinkin’, from 1861 to 1870, was six thousand millions of dollars. Add to that, the labor in raisin’ the grain to make it; all the labor of distillin’ it; all the loss of labor the drinkin’ of it entailed; the sickness, deaths and crimes that resulted from its use; the ships that went down in mid-ocean, through the drunkenness of their crews—engulfin’ thousands of lives; the ghastly railroad accidents that fill our newspapers with long death-lists; the suicides and thousands of fatal accidents, all over the land, caused by it; the robberies and murders, and the cost of tryin’ the criminals, buildin’ the prisons, penitentiaries and jails, and supportin’ them therein; the alms-houses for the paupers made by it; the asylums for the insane, and the hirin’ of officers and attendants to take care of them. Imagine the sum-total if you can, and add to it, the six thousand millions of dollars,—and all spent for that which is not only useless, but ruinous. And honest, sober citizens consent to have their property taxed to support this system. “What if this enormous amount of money was spent by our government, for the compulsory education of the childern of the poor; takin’ them from their wretched haunts and dens—schools of infamy, where they are bein’ educated in criminality—and teachin’ them to be honest and self-supportin’. What a marvelous decrease of crime there would be; what a marvelous increase of the national wealth and respectability.” He said he had been lookin’ upon the subject in a financial point of view, for its moral effects could not be reduced to statistics. Says he: