factory girl learns to drink, and when she
marries she takes her drinking habits with her into her home. Modern
industrialism, therefore, is to be cited as one of the causes for the
increase in drinking amongst women. It may be noted that, in Italy, the
temperate race which, according to one elegant but baseless theory, has
been evolved through ages of past drinking, is proving itself
intemperate when its members are exposed in towns to the industrial
conditions which look like national success and the continuance of which
would mean national ruin.

A third cause of this increase is to be found in the greatly enhanced
facility with which alcoholic drinks can now be obtained by women, not
merely outside the home, but within it. So far as Great Britain is
concerned we must trace disastrous consequences to the "heaven-born
finance" of a former illustrious Chancellor of the Exchequer, who made a
little money for the State by selling to grocers permission to sell
alcoholic liquors. That was a great blow at womanhood and especially
motherhood; not to mention its lamentable effect in raising the
death-rate amongst grocers in that intensely obvious and inevitable
manner, the increase of temptation, which nothing can persuade the
enemies of temperance reform to understand.

It is bad enough that women should be able to obtain alcohol as they do
by means of devices which may often prevent their habits from being
discovered at all until irreparable mischief has been done. Here the
cunning and the greed of commercialism have set to work to fool the
public and poison it by a systematic practice which is injurious to all
sections of the community, but especially to women, and which cannot be
too widely reprobated and exposed. All honour is due to the _British
Medical Journal_, the official organ of the British Medical Association,
for its recent attention to this subject. No one can challenge it when
it makes the following assertion regarding meat-wines and other
specifics containing alcohol, which are now so widely advertised and
consumed:--"It may be pointed out that by the use of these meat-wines
the alcoholic habit may be encouraged and established, and that it is a
mistake to suppose that they possess any high nutritive qualities." The
following are analyses to which everyone ought to be able to have
reference, and further information regarding which may be found in the
_British Medical Journal_ for March 27 and May 29, 1909. L