The LOSS OF WEALTH, which some of the foregoing considerations will enable us to estimate, has increased with the progress of our national development in a way which in many respects has made that progress a curse instead of a blessing. Thirty-five years ago our brethren in Maine had a hard fight against the champions of the liquor traffic, but they had to deal with whiskey alone. Since then our foreign immigrants have introduced ale, lager beer, and French high wines, and threaten to introduce _absinthe_[9] and opium. The poison vice has assumed the magnitude of a pandemic plague. According to the statistics of the Treasury Department, the alcohol drinkers of the United States spent during the last ten years a yearly average of $370,000,000 for whiskey, $53,000,000 for other distilled liquors, $56,000,000 for wine, and $140,000,000 for ale and beer. Together, $624,000,000 a year. Under the head of liquors evading the revenue tax, Prof. W. Hoyle, of Manchester, adds 20 per cent. for Great Britain, Commissioner Halliday 15 per cent. for the United States, and Dr. Bowditch 18 per cent. for the state of Massachusetts alone. Let us assume the minimum of 15 per cent. The total direct cost of the poison vice (without including tobacco and other narcotic stimulants) is therefore $705,000,000 a year. The indirect cost eludes computation, except under the three following heads: 1. The loss of productive capacity, as revealed in the difference between the yearly earnings of a manufacturing community under the protection of prohibitory laws or under the influence of the license system. 2. The inebriate percentage of patients in our public hospitals, and of convicts in our prisons. 3. The loss sustained by the employers of agents, trustees, clerks, etc., addicted to the use of intoxicating liquors. The aggregate of these indirect losses we will assume to be only $350,000,000 a year, though several political economists compute it as _equal to the direct cost_. Our estimate does not include the amount of rum-begotten distress relieved by private charity, nor the rum percentage of undetected crime, nor yet the wholly incalculable value of the benefactions, reforms and improvements _prevented_ by the use of intoxicating liquors among the upper classes. We can therefore be quite sure of understating the truth if we estimate the aggregate cost of the poison vice at $1,055,000,000 a year—a yearly sum equivalent to the cost value of all our public libraries, our church property, school property, steamboats, bridges, and telegraphs taken together.