Fort Worth Daily Gazette

What Prohibition Would Do.
Chicago Herald.

The national prohibition movement now in progress is a menace to thousands of people and to millions of money. If successful it would deprive many people of a means of earning a livelihood, and it would wipe out property and fortunes as remorselessly as war. It is not possible to show how many people would be affected in one way or another by prohibition, but those who would be directly concerned are as follows:

Hotel keepers 82,453

Restaurant keepers 13,074

Saloon and bar keepers 64,461

Traders and dealers in liquor 18,500

Brewers and maltsters 16,278

Distillers and rectifiers 8,215

Total 147,011

Besides the above there are thousands of laborers and others dependent upon them for work who would necessarily be thrown out of employment if the liquor traffic should be suppressed.

Probably this class would swell the number above given to very nearly 200,000 men, most of whom have families. The industries largely sustained by the liquor traffic, such as coopering, teaming, farming, building and transportation, would all be heavy sufferers by the extinction of the business. Some idea of the property interests threatened by the prohibition movement may be obtained from the following table, showing the capital invested and the materials consumed in the manufacture of the various descriptions of liquor:

Capital, Materials used.
Liquor, distilled $24,000,000 $27,000,000
Liquor, malt $91,000,000 $57,000,000
Liquor, vinous $2,500,000 $1,803,000

The first column gives the approximate value of real estate and machinery used in the manufacture of liquor and which would be valueless for anything else. The last column may be taken as an average of the amount of money paid yearly by liquor manufacturers to the farmers of the country. The destruction of the liquor interest would drive thousands of men to agriculture and at the same time curtail the demand for the products of that industry.