(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]