Waterbury evening Democrat., 1903-10-28
WOMEN WHO DRINK.

England Seems to Have More Than
 Enough of Them in London
 But in order rightly to understand we must leave for moment the fields and flowers and the birds and beasts, and go into the dingy city and pass the courts and alleys and the pawn brokers shops and the old clothes kitchen where the rats share the damp darkness with the inhabitants, and then walk out again into the dusty street.; and then we shall begin to understand what is the center of at traction to the dwellers in the narrow court and gloomy slum. At the corner of the stdeet there is public house, and, if we watch the swinging door for minute we shall be able to to realize why it is that in England there are more drunken women than in any other nation, and how it is ] that brewers have made larger for tunes than can be amassed in any oth- CT trade.
 Between the hours of and 3 o'clock you will see in this squalid district from 100 to POO women enter the drink shop with little babies in their arms, and as those women crowd into that public house and stand to drink. they will often give the baby a share of the liquor. and and the lit tie mouth will gFeedily suck the spoon or the glass that has i'll it the taste of gin. Between those hours. too, you will see 150 or 200 girls. with almost sl1oeless feet. all ragged. all dirty. all disheveled, entering with jugs 10 carry away the drink to their misera ble homes. As many boys under the age of 14 or fifteen will be there. too. mak- ing total in one afternoon of 800 children. I remember on one occasion standing in front of just such pub lie house-and if you look down the street you will see that there are 20 more-with an American. and when she saw the women going into the pub lie house. some of them respectfully clad she said: Are they going to hold crusade meeting there as they did in America 20 years ago?'
 It seemed to her inconceivable that women were going there to drink: but to us it has become a common place. and those who know anything !, of the social life of, the people of Eng land have long realized that children are drunk for the first time i'll their mothers arms. or cursed with the ap- petite before they are born. In their earliest associations the public house stands as the most prominent factor in their existence and has stored their minds with the impressions of every thing that is vile and bad
 But there is another picture of our social Rfe of which I have to speak before I go back again to the coun- try farm and, in order to bring this before the. minds of those who are in- terested in social problems. I must ask them to 90 inside as large London drink den. There you will find that the finest houses are supplied with a great number of entrances, six eight or ten. and each of these entrances leads into separate small bar. and. if you are inclined to sit for a mo- ment and ask for glass of lemonade, you can watch those who pass in and out.
 \ young girl. we'll dressed and of respectable parentage, will come in. accompanied by the young man to whom she is engaged and they will call for glass Of spirits or beer, and sit down to drink a $ a matter of course A middle-aged woman who has known better days. draws her mantle about her. and looks to see if anyone has mo- ticed that she has crossed the thresh- old: her face is pale and drawn. and she has anxions lines about her eyes. Employment is hard to get and she is going to try to forget how difficult it Is to live, as she carries in her thin. trembling hand a glass of neat spirit to the further corner of the bar. Then there are a middle-aged man and his wife who ask for beer, woman with baby and a young husband: the baby cries and the mother dips her fingers in her glass and rIlbs it's lips A little noise in another bar tells us that there a different class has as sembled. and there we see the ragged denizens of the slnms; but every class Is represented. and among them wo- me-, are prominently to he found
 What wonder. then. that as we read the annals of our English police courts we realize that drunkenness has not only invaded the homes of the poorest of the people. but also that drinking is alarmingly on the increase among wo- men of the wealthy and the leisured classes: that not only are destitute and degraded women committed to our prisons who are unable to pay the fine. but that women in apparently re spectabie positions are continually con victed of drunk kenness. until it may be truly said that scarcely a family exists but has some record of this hideous disease Lady Henry Somerset in the North American Review.
 MAoRRADY's QUICK WHIT.
 Joseph Jefferson, in lecture on the