Stepping aside from sentiment, and coming down to practical facts, Rev. Theodore Cuyler says that the liquor question “enters more immediately into the enrichment or the impoverishment of the national resources than any question of tariff or currency. More money is touched by the drink traffic and the effects of the traffic than by any other trade known among men. The tax upon national resources levied by the bottle is far heavier than the combined taxes for every object of public well-being.” Statistics of drink are undoubtedly more appalling than those of the most bloody and senseless war that the world ever knew. Some that are published are entirely untrustworthy; a head for reform does not always mean a head for figures; so figures are often made to lie, like tombstones. But the truth is bad enough. It is plain to any man who knows anything about current values that the price of a glass of poor beer will buy a pound of good bread, and the price of a glass of best whiskey will buy a pound of the best meat. Yet a great deal more money goes for beer and whiskey than for bread and meat. Why? Depraved appetite, answers the professional moralist. This is the veriest nonsense, although it is the commonest of the reasons that are given for inordinate indulgence in stimulants. An appetite, properly speaking, must be of a fixed nature. There is no drunkard alive who has a fixed appetite for liquor. The depraved appetite, so-called, is an occasional manifestation of the influence of long indulgence in alcoholic stimulants, but it is no more possible to prolong it and make it a fixed condition of a man’s life than it is for a human being to make a voyage to the moon. The first purpose of drink, to any one who is beginning to use liquor, is to “feel good,” and there is no denying that this is a general longing in every grade of humanity, from the highest to the lowest. Most human beings of the lower order are full of physical defects, all the way from those of the muscles and joints to those of the vital organs and nerves. If you ask the southern field-hand how he feels, you may safely bet that he will answer, “pooty porely,” and to get relief from his aches and pains he resorts to liquor, whenever he can get it. The Indian is another specimen of the man who wants to “feel good.” He is supposed to be physically a splendid child of nature, but he seldom is without some serious functional disorder or inherited curse of the flesh which makes him the willing slave of any stimulant he can get. A great host of unfortunates who have come to the United States from other lands are practically in the same condition; starved, abused, and underfed for generations and centuries, a glass of rum is to them like the touch of an angel, and a jugful is the equivalent of a heavenly host. There is no sense in talking about “depraved appetites” when you contemplate these people, from whom come the mass of the rumseller’s customers.