A LIQUOR-LAW FOR LADIES.
It is comforting to hear of the opening of an inebriate asylum for women "of the middle and upper classes" by a Philadelphia female temperance association—much more so than to think of the need of such an institution. Such things were unknown in the old days, when hard drinking is supposed to have been so much more common than now among the other sex. Six-bottle men were not rarities then, but we read of no six-bottle, or three-bottle, women. The ladies were not toasted till after they had left the table for the sober and solitary pleasures of the drawing-room, and were not expected to respond to an honor of which they were made conscious only by stamping, cheering and clinking of glasses by the boys they left behind them. The bare idea of an inebriate asylum for the reform of their tippling lords would have horrified them. More indescribable still would have been their sensations at such a suggestion for their own moral reconstruction. Our esteemed grandparents did not know their own sinfulness, and could not dream of the pitch of depravity in the way of winebibbing their fair descendants were destined to attain.
Can it be that they have attained it, and that reformatory retreats are necessary to wean well reared and educated American wives and daughters from indulgence in so unfeminine a weakness? Let us hasten to remember that in a population approaching a million of souls it is possible to find thirty or forty fit subjects for reform of almost any imaginable kind. That number of bibulous ladies collected within a space of twenty square miles would be incomparably more noticeable than five times as many scattered over the two largest States of the Union, which together did not a hundred years ago contain more inhabitants. For all that, the announcement grates harshly upon our ears—so harshly as to create a doubt whether the fact, or the formal and open recognition of it and provision for its remedy, be the greater evil. Would it not be preferable for each household in a case of the kind to encounter quietly, within its own doors, its own trouble? Could any disciplinarians be more earnest and assiduous, and any discipline more salutary, than those of home?
These, it may be objected, are presumed to have been tried fully, and tried in vain, and the asylum is proposed only in the last resort. But what asylum better than the domestic can there be for any woman? Failing that, what further can remain? Removal, in an asylum, from temptation and opportunity would of course put a present end to indulgence, and might temporarily suppress the craving. We can understand how a woman might express her own struggle against the failing by a determination to have her own will supplemented in strength by the constraint of a reformatory; and the chance might properly be offered her. This, however, implies a defect in the domestic influences applicable to her particular case—a defect which would continue after her discharge, and require to be made up by the same self-control which had been already tried and found wanting. And her moral power of resistance would be weakened by the consciousness of having been forced to submit to an exceptional and humiliating expedient, and to publish her weakness to the world.
We are told that intemperance may be—and in many cases can only be—treated as a physical disease in hospitals conducted by physicians who have made it a specialty. This may be so. When Science steps in, the non-scientific laity can only bow, or, if they venture a word, speak with bated breath. The cause, however, it is clear, if constitutional, can hardly be removed by any physician. If not constitutional, it is indispensable to get rid of, and permanently keep out of operation, the predisposing and the aggravating influences. For this his aid is not essential. The means called for are generally quite different from those he is accustomed to employ. They are within the reach of, and most effectually applied by, friends, society and the subject, and surely ought to exclude the necessity for an inebriate asylum for "women of the upper and
