(a) Nearly, if not quite, two billion dollars a year are spent by the people of the United States for intoxicating beverages. Between fifty and seventy-five million bushels of grain are consumed annually in their production, besides the grapes used for wines. Nor does the money spent for liquors go in any appreciable degree into the pockets of the farmers who raise the grains; less than a thirtieth part finds its way to them, the brewers, distillers, and retailers getting about two thirds. The money invested in the beer industry alone was in 1909 over $550,000,000. [Footnote: See Independent, vol. 67, p. 1326; Year-Books of the Anti-Saloon League. For this whole subject of the cost of the liquor trade, see chap. V, in H. S. Warner, op. cit, and the bibliography appended.] The importance of the national liquor bill can be realized by a simple computation; it would suffice to pay two million men three dollars a day, six days in the week, year in and year out; it would suffice to build four or five Panama Canals (at $400,000,000) a year. When we reckon up the total liquor bill of the world, a sum many times this, we can see what a frightful waste of man's resources is going on; for not only is there no a tremendous additional drain of wealth caused indirectly thereby. (b) Among the factors in this additional drain of wealth, which must be added to the figures given above in estimating the total financial loss to the community, are: the loss in efficiency of workers through the- usually unrealized- toxic effects of alcohol; the loss of the lives of adult workers due to alcoholic poisoning-an annual loss greater than that of the whole Civil War; the support by the State of paupers, two fifths of whom, it is estimated, owe their status to alcoholism; [Footnote: See H. S. Williams, op. cit, p. 85] the support by the State of the insane, from a quarter to a half of whom owe their insanity directly or indirectly to alcohol; [Footnote: Ibid, p. 63] the support of destitute and deserted children; [Footnote: Ibid, p. 89 ] the maintenance of prisons, of courts, and police - the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics has shown that eighty-four per cent of all criminals under conviction in the correctional institutions of that State committed their crimes under the influence of alcohol. [Footnote: Ibid, p. 72] When we add to this the still greater numbers of incapables supported by their families and friends, we realize that the national drink bill is really very much greater than the mere sums spent for liquor. Comparative statistics show graphically how strikingly pauperism, crime, and destitution are diminished by prohibition. It is variously estimated that a fourth or a third or more of all acute poverty is due directly or indirectly to alcohol. Our municipalities are always poor; all sorts of needed improvements are blocked for lack of funds. If this leakage of the national wealth can be stopped we shall be able with the money saved