The story of my life ; or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years / by Mary A. Livermore ... with hitherto unrecorded incidents and recollections of three years' experience as an army nurse in the great Civil War, and reminiscences of twenty-five years' experiences on the lecture platform ... to which is added six of her most popular lectures ... with portraits and one hundred and twenty engravings from designs by eminent artists ...

DOES THE LIQUOR TRAFFIC PAY?

Chipagos, and indemnify every one who lost to the uttermost, and then be one hundred million dollars richer than
we now shall be. It is a simple problem in arithmetic.
Two hundred million dollars' worth of property were
burned to ashes in Chicago, and four times that sum are
eight hundred million dollars. The difference between this
amount and nine hundred million dollars,- which is the
drink bill of the nation,- is one hundred million dollars.
You see why there is poverty and sfarvation in the land,
why children cry for bread, and the poorhouses are full to
overflowing, and why beggarly tramps, to the number of
nearly a hundred thousand, are stalking through the country, living by their wits, sometimes by thieving, and sometimes unfed. There is another cause for this destitution
than " hard times," " financial panics," and lack of employment. If we could stop the waste that comes through the
annual expenditure of nine hundred million dollars for
strong drink, there would soon be competence, where there
is now abject poverty.
If a money loss were the only one occasioned by the
drinking habits of the people, we could afford it. The nation is rich enough to spend that sum for the pleasures of
its people, if it caused no other loss. A few weeks since, I
visited the Woman's Reformatory Prison at Sherborn, Massachusetts. I went through the various departments, and
met the women convicts in the chapel, under the guidance
of its woman warden, Mrs. Ellen C. Johnson, - a woman
who cannot be duplicated in the United States, so marvelous are her qualifications for the office she holds. I inquired how many of the women in this institution were the
victims of strong drink? We went to the office and' examined the books of commitment, where every woman's name
is recorded, with the crime for which she is incarcerated,