one or two treatments out of deference to the entreaties of friends, and hence there was no objective self-surrender; a few, through their excesses, had entered the syndrome of alcoholic dementia; some were society women who, in his experience, are almost without the pale of hope. On the whole, however, the psychic practitioner is fully warranted in saying to the sufferer: “If you sincerely desire to be cured of this malady, and will carry out my instructions faithfully for a year, you can be cured beyond a peradventure.'

The drink habit is growing, especially among our city women, from shopmaid and nymph du pave to the pampered dames of upper society. Girls representing good families unblushingly assert a right to drink wine and smoke cigarettes at luncheons and levees, at the misnamed the dansant, and in the corridors of the hotels; and not a few of this class, as well as young married women, have been brought to the writer's office in a state of intoxication. Such has become the vogue; and, worse than this, girls in their teens see no impropriety in drinking publicly with men companions. A few years ago a woman sitting with a cocktail before her, amid such surroundings and polluting the air with tobacco smoke, would have been set down as a cyprian. The abstinent, unobtrusive young lady of the

past generation is giving place to a coarse, boisterous, immodestly attired high liver controlled by unworthy impulses, and wholly unfit to fulfil her function in the community as an inspirer to meritorious action, or her function in the home as a character-former, a wife, and a mother. Verily, the beau-monde reflects a piteous state of preparedness for combat with the forces of evil that threaten to disrupt society. Verily, the national force that is wasting to-day in America is woman; and she who prostitutes her obligation to her sex in a life of self-indulgence and demoralizing example should be brought to her senses by the thought that no nation can be truly great unless its women, as a class, represent an actual and impelling power for personal righteousness. Thank God there are true women, and not a few the land over, who are nobly upholding the highest ideals of womanhood, and of the very race, in domestic and social relations, in politics, and in professional life.

What has been said is germane to the attitude of the well-to-do classes, for with the great mass of working people in the cities, the habit of drink is noticeably on the wane; and the saloonkeepers, who have long absorbed a generous fraction of the laborer's hard-earned wage, fear for the future of their nefarious business of "swapping the souls of men" for mammon. The poor

or moderately salaried man is not only developing a knowledge of the perils of alcoholic indulgence through the strenuous efforts of both Catholic and Protestant educators, but he recognizes the necessity of economy, and he has come to appreciate the superior attractions of the photo-drama. The moving-picture show is the great adversary of the saloon. In its comfortable parterre, a man may be entertained with his family for a whole evening and for less money than he would ordinarily spend in the card-rooms that figure at the rear of every bar. These clubs of the poor, where the man of labor and the youth of the store pass their evenings in drinking and card-playing, are dehumanizing our brothers of the tenement, aiming to destroy their capacity both for conferring and enjoying domestic happiness. The moving-picture show offers a form of instructive entertainment that is cheap enough to be within the reach of all working people, and popular enough to drain the lounging-rooms of the cabarets. The saloon is out of step with the times.

But independent of the contingent of working people who are abjuring alcohol in the cities, there does exist a prevalent wholesale addiction to the use of stimulants, with its accompanying degenerations of organs; its pernicious influence in the causation of pulmonary disease; its marked

action in increasing the mortality rate in the case of all diseases (about fifteen per cent. of all deaths being due to such action, directly or indirectly); the part it plays in the induction of insanity, standing as the greatest single independent cause of mental down-pitch; and its tendency to transmit to offspring not only epilepsy, deaf-mutism, and mental enfeeblement, but marked criminal propensity. And this evil is assuming proportions so appalling that it may justly be regarded as perhaps the greatest existing menace to the stability of American institutions.

The opinion of the medical profession in regard to the use of alcohol as a beverage and a therapeutic agent is distinctly unfavorable today. Physicians look upon it as a protoplasmic poison, and are advising against its employment where it was once warmly recommended; as, for instance, in nervous depression, dyspepsia, insomnia, and tuberculosis. We now know that alcoholic drinks interfere with digestion, predispose to cardiorenal and pulmonary troubles, and impair the elimination of toxins created in the body which are the cause of gastric acidity, sleeplessness, and general neurasthenia, as well as of high blood pressure and premature arteriosclerosis. Thus the use of alcohol indirectly contributes to the development of a form of

arterial degeneration designated as hardening, which is directly due to auto-intoxication accentuated by the ingestion of this poison. The majority of people overeat and underexercise. Sixty per cent. of Americans work indoors at sedentary vocations, and these drink moderately as a habit, and oversmoke as well; they do so in response to the demand of a system depressed by a superabundance of food that cannot be disposed of, and of unnatural work that keeps up the demand. What these persons drink to reinforce nervous energy is itself a most dangerous compound made of crude grain or potato spirits, or fusel oil, and various "essences manufactured in laboratories-a compound sixteen times as deadly in its effects on the brain and other organs as is ethyl alcohol in pure whisky. And the beer and ale of this country contain sulphurous acid and other adulterants, much of it preservative in its action; these malted liquors are therefore antagonistic to digestion, which is a form of fermentation, and constitute a kidney and liver irritant which has to be reckoned with by the doctor, and is taken into serious consideration by life insurance companies.1

1 A recent move of the New York Health Department in its campaign against alcoholic beverages was the publication on July 31st, of the results obtained from a study of the effects of alcohol