The two are older and coarser. They are often before the court, when the police tell of their bad language and worse conduct, and sometimes they go to prison. Their mourning has long since been worn out or been torn to shreds, but the tallyman has been paid in full, and the doctor was not defrauded. _Deus misereatur._ No, the devil does not have it all his own way even with these women, not till the evening of their lives, not till they have become ghouls, not till they are left with but one passion to satisfy, not till King Alcohol has claimed them for his own--not till then does all goodness die within them. _Deus misereatur_, for it is a frightful power that impels these women to the streets of London. Drunkenness with them is but the symptom of a deeper cause, and this cause is not alone the possession of the poor; women of middle age, wives of well-to-do and cultured husbands, mothers of many children, leave those homes, husbands, and children to roll in the sensual sties of London. ‘My punishment is greater than I can bear. It is my eldest son’s twenty-first birthday, and I am two hundred miles away. I must come back, if only to look once more through the window.’ So wrote the mother of eight children to me. She had left them and her beautiful home for the wild and gross degradation of the streets; she had become one of the most notorious of our police-court habitués; she revelled in impurity, and down to the lowest depths she sank. So I sent her away, not hoping to reform her, but hoping that she might, at any rate, live a less scandalous life. To look once more through the windows of her once happy home she came back to London, came back to die in one of our workhouses. Their punishment is greater than they can bear, and the punishment that the law inflicts is but a small portion of it. ‘Take away the drink, and they will be all right.’ I yield to no man in my detestation of drink. I know its power and effects as but very few can; but with the great majority of these women it is not a question of drink at all. Mentally diseased, or sensually possessed, they present a hopeless problem, and unless science, in conjunction with human sympathy, can find some method of treating them as patients as well as sinners, the problem will go unsolved.