ied by the relief society, and had gone on a
spree. He was a good workman, and could always have work when sober,
but even when at work he neglected to provide properly for his family.
Stung at last into active resistance, his wife had him arrested for
non-support. While the man awaited trial, the Charity Organization
Society removed his family, found work for the wife where she could
keep three of her children, placed one with a relative, and two others
temporarily in institutions. When he was released, he had no family to
attract charitable aid, and was thrown, for the first time in many
years, entirely upon his own resources.

Many good people may think that to deprive a man of family ties is to
hasten his downfall; but what downfall could be more complete than the
downfall of the man who not only permits his wife to support him, but
abuses her and his children? In making this no longer possible we are
sometimes doing the one thing that can be done to save him from {57}
spreading the contagion of his brutality, and so assuming a still
heavier burden of sin.

There are many charitable visitors to whom the very thought of strong
drink is so offensive, to whom everything connected with the saloon
seems so brutal and degraded, that they are unable to make allowance
for national, neighborhood, and family traditions in judging a man's
habits. It sometimes happens that a whole family are condemned as
"frauds" because they drink beer for dinner, or because the man of the
house has been seen to enter a saloon. On no subject, perhaps, are
charity workers so divided as on the question of how best to deal with
the drink evil. Here, if anywhere, fanaticism is excusable, perhaps;
but here, as everywhere, the friendly visitor must be on guard against
personal prejudice and a hasty jumping at conclusions. "At night all
cats are gray," says the old proverb, and it is only the benighted
social reformer that thinks of all who drink as drunkards, and of all
places where liquor is sold as dens of vice. The saloon is still the
workingman's {58} club, and, until some satisfactory substitute is
found for it, all our denunciations will fail to banish it. It is none
the less true that, of all personal habits, the drink habit stands next
to licentiousness as a cause of poverty and degeneration.

"The problem of intemperance meets us in less than half the families
that we know," says the Secretary of the Boston Associated Charitie