ages, and in all climes and at all times has seized hold upon certain women--a something that never releases its hold till the portals of death are open for its victims? Oh, I could almost laugh at the irony of it all! Cure them of animal passion elemental in its intensity? Cure them of diseased minds and disordered brains, by keeping them for two or three years without drink? It cannot be done. But something can be done; only it is so simple a thing that I feel sure it will not be done. Yet if we had any thought for the purity of our streets, any concern for public morality and public decency, any consideration for the public weal, we should take these women aside, and keep them aside--not for one, two, or three years, but for the remainder of their natural lives, justified by the knowledge that they are not responsible creatures, and that pity itself demands their submission to kindly control and to strong-handed restraint. But the Licensing Act of 1902 dealt with another class of women inebriates, and dealt with them in a drastic but unsatisfactory way. The law got hold of really drunken women this time, but it did not give them half the consideration extended to gross and demented unfortunates. It empowered magistrates to grant separation orders between married couples when either husband or wife became habitually drunken. In this Act the same definition of habitual inebriety that governed the 1898 Act was adopted, and husbands very promptly began to demand separation orders on account of their wives' drunkenness. My experiences of the result of this Act are sorrowful to a degree; but I expected those results, for I knew that the clauses that empowered separation orders must be either inoperative or disastrous. Alas! they did not remain inoperative, for the number of discarded wives began quickly to multiply.