Waste, Stopping
Moral wastes like saloons cause great loss, needing national effort to eradicate.
The Agricultural Department has inaugurated a war on rats, not as a preventive of the plague or on account of health, but because of the great loss produced in the country by rats, and especially to farmers and producers. The department claims that a rat eats sixty cents’ worth of grain a year, and that the actual destruction caused by them amounts to over one hundred millions of dollars a year. The extermination of rats will be a great undertaking. Yet it could be accomplished by national effort were it not for the new supplies brought by ships. It is believed that by proper regulations even this supply might be cut off, or the rats killed before spreading. It would cost only a small part of the one hundred millions of dollars to exterminate the rat. The expenditure of ten millions under national authority would be economy.
There are moral wastes comparatively more destructive than the plague of rats, that all men should join in exterminating--the saloon, for example.