WASTED MONEY.
COST OF ALCOHOL.
[Illustration: N]OW that you have learned about your bodies, and what
alcohol will do to them, you ought also to know that alcohol costs a
great deal of money. Money spent for that which will do no good, but
only harm, is certainly wasted, and worse than wasted.
If a boy or a girl save ten cents a week, it will take ten weeks to save
a dollar.
You can all think of many good and pleasant ways to spend a dollar. What
would the beer-drinker do with it? If he takes two mugs of beer a day,
the dollar will be used up in ten days. But we ought not to say used,
because that word will make us think it was spent usefully. We will say,
instead, the dollar will be wasted, in ten days.
If he spends it for wine or whiskey, it will go sooner, as these cost
more. If no money was spent for liquor in this country, people would not
so often be sick, or poor, or bad, or wretched. We should not need so
many policemen, and jails, and prisons, as we have now. If no liquor was
drunk, men, women, and children would be better and happier.
COST OF TOBACCO.
Most of you have a little money of your own. Perhaps you earned a part,
or the whole of it, yourselves. You are planning what to do with it, and
that is a very pleasant kind of planning.
Do you think it would be wise to make a dollar bill into a tight little
roll, light one end of it with a match, and then let it slowly burn up?
That would be wasting it, you say! (_See Frontispiece._)
Yes! it would be wasted, if thus burned. It would be worse than wasted,
if, while burning, it should also hurt the person who held it. If you
should buy cigars or tobacco with your dollar, and smoke them, you could
soon burn up the dollar and hurt yourselves besides.
Can you count a million? Can you count a hundred millions? Try some day
to do this counting. Then, when you begin to have some idea how much six
hundred millions is, remember that six hundred million dollars are spent
in this country every year for tobacco--burned up--wasted--worse than
wasted.
Do you think the farmer who planted tobacco instead of corn, did any
good to the world by the change?
REVIEW QUESTIONS.
1. How may one waste money?
2. Name some good ways for spending money.
3. How does the liquor-drinker spend his money?
4. What could we do, if no money was spent for
liquor?
5. Tell two ways in which you could burn up a
dollar bill.
6. Which would be the safer way?
7. How much money is spent for tobacco, yearly, in
this country?
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Transcriber's Notes:
This book contains pronunciation codes. These are indicated in the text
by the following
breve: [)i]
macron: [=i]
tilde: [~i]
slash through the letter: [\l]
Obvious punctuation errors repaired.