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?

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defeat. With the experiences and confidences of the last
twenty years, during which I have been very much occupied in the temperance reform, I never talk to an audience
on the sulbject of temperance without remembering this
incident. If I could unroof the souls of those whom I am
addressing, and look in upon their secret griefs known only
to God, how many of you should I find refusing to be comforted, because of the ruin of the son in whom you had
garnered your hopes, or the destruction of the daughter
who was the very light of your life. Does the liquor traffic
pay, dear friends? Will one of you say, now that you
know the pecuniary loss, and the waste of men and women
to which the liquor traffic subjects us, that it is a paying
business? The money loss of this nefarious traffic should
alone be sufficient reason for its extirpation. Honorable
Carroll D- Wright, Chief of the National Bureau of the
Statistics of Labor, is authority for the statement that
for every dollar paid in by the saloons for their licenses,
twenty-one dollars are paid out by the people, who are compelled to bear the cost and waste and damage, that are
incidental to the business of the saloon. Honorable Edward Atkinson, one of the leading fiscal statisticians of our
times, tells us that while it costs but five dollars per capita
to run the government, the annual cost of spirits, beer, and
wine is fifteen dollars a head. From whatever standpoint
the estimate is made the liquor traffic is a losing business.
It robs the people,--it demoralizes the community,--it
engenders vice and crime, and is a steady menace to
civilization.
If we would see the deadliest work wrought by the liquor
traffic, and the appetite for strong drink, we must go to the
" slums." In all cities there are "slums," - unclean, festering, seething, ruinous, uncanny quarters, where human be43