and physical, is the type that
woman's education and training, at least in the past, have tended to
make. She has not been taught, she has not the power, to stand in life
alone; she is the clinging vine to the man's oak, she is the traditional
woman. She is happy and well with the right man, but Heaven help her if
the marriage ceremony links her with a philanderer! For she has been
taught to accept as true and right that mischievous couplet:

Love is of man's life a thing apart,
'Tis woman's whole existence.

We need for our womanhood a braver standpoint than that, one more
firmly based, less apt to bring failure and disaster. For neither man
nor woman should love be the whole existence. It should be a fundamental
purpose interwoven with other purposes.

Fortunately one source of domestic difficulty will soon pass from
America,--alcoholism. Politicians and theorizers may speak of the blow
to individual liberty and satirically prophesy that soon coffee and
tobacco will be legislated out also. They need to read Gilbert
Chesterton and learn that though "a tree grows upward it stops growing
and never reaches the sky." To see, as I do, the almost complete absence
of delirium tremens from the emergency and city hospitals, where once
every Sunday morning found a dozen or two of raving men; to witness the
disappearance of alcoholic insanity from our asylums, where once it
constituted fifteen per cent of the male admissions; to see cruelty to
children drop to one tenth of its former incidence; to know that former
drunkards are steadily at work to the joy of their wives and the good of
their own souls,--this is to make one bitterly impatient with the
chatter about the "joy and pleasure of life gone," etc. etc., that has
become the stock-in-trade of the stage and the press. Though alcoholism
did not cause all poverty, it stupefied men's minds so that they
permitted much preventable poverty; though it did not cause all
immorality, a few drinks often sent a good man to the brothel; and what
is more, many of the brothel inmates endured their life largely because
of the stupefying use of alcohol.

No one knows the evil of alcohol more than the poor housewife. Of course
the woman brought up to believe that drunkenness was to be expected in a
man--and who often drank with him--was a victim without severe mental
anguish, though her whole life was ruined by drink. But for the refined
woman who married a clean, clever young fellow