“The drink bill of Great Britain annually amounts to one hundred and forty million pounds sterling. This is about five pound sterling per head of the inhabitants. It is estimated that sixty per cent. of this, or eighty-four millions, comes out of the wages of the working classes. There are one million six hundred thousand acres in England cultivated for barley and fifty thousand for hops. Seventy million bushels of grain are worse than wasted in manufacturing drink. Allowing forty pounds of flour to a bushel, and sixty pounds of bread, the total would be one billion and fifty million, four pound loaves, or one hundred and seventy loaves for each family of five persons throughout the United Kingdom. In twenty-five years there have been four million two hundred and sixty-eight thousand and twenty-two arrests of drunk and disorderlies, and probably not one in twenty of the drunkards arrested. There are one million forty thousand, one hundred and three paupers in England and Wales, or one in nineteen of the whole population, nine-tenths caused by drink. There are one hundred and forty thousand criminals, mostly owing to drink, and twenty-five thousand policemen required to keep public houses in order and protect life and property; forty-three thousand lunatics in the asylums. In England, one in every one hundred and seventy of the total population is convicted of drunkenness.” Lord Chief Justice Coleridge states that nine out of every ten gaols would be closed but for drink. Justice Fitzgerald says that drunkenness leads to nineteen-twentieths of the crimes; Mr. Mulhall, that forty-eight per cent. of the idiocy in England arises from the drunkenness of the parents, and one-third of the insanity in the United Kingdom is the effect of drink; Sir James Horner, that seventy-five out of every hundred of the divorce cases are brought about by drink; Mr. Gladstone, that drink has caused greater calamities than the three great historical scourges, war, famine and pestilence. A distinguished English writer says that, “the poverty of the poor is the chief cause of the weakness and inefficiency which are the causes of their poverty, dire poverty and the frequency of public houses act and react upon one another, poverty increasing public houses, and public houses increasing poverty.” A Government report shows that it costs five and three quarter millions sterling a year for the repression of crime in England, and while they spend one hundred and forty millions sterling a year for drink, the British spend only two millions a year on books. With such facts, showing the waste of food, the unnatural bill of costs and the inevitable losses caused by the demoralization of the people, can any one doubt the cause of the squalid poverty of the masses of Great Britain? And it is a civilized Christian nation that tolerates and encourages such things!