AP Success - AP US History: Evils of Intemperance

When we behold an individual cut off in youth, or in middle age...such instances are multiplying in our land...the amount of earnings prevented or squandered is incalculable...the accumulating and frightful expense incurred for the support of those and their families, whom intemperance has made paupers...The receptacles for the poor are becoming too strait for their accommodation...They drink up their daily earnings, and bless God for the poor-house...Thus is the insatiable destroyer of industry marching through the land, rearing poor-houses, and augmenting taxation...squandering property, cutting the sinews of industry...cutting short the date of life, and rolling up a national debt...continually transferring larger and larger bodies of men, from the class of contributors to the national income, to the class of worthless consumers.