No one unacquainted with the life of a drunkard, but especially of an habitual female drunkard, can form a correct idea of the irrepressible thirst which the constant use of intoxicating liquors imposes. In a man it is usually a love of the _taste_ of drink and the habit of social drinking; and the habit is often broken and the male drunkard restored. In woman the desire is for the _effect_ of liquor, the feelings to which it gives rise; and the indulgence is more frequently solitary than social: and however strong the sense of wrong, however deep may be the regret for the folly when the evil moment of intoxication is over and the secondary results succeed, still it rarely happens that the repentance is deep or the amendment permanent. We do not know how many women have triumphed over a strong appetite for intoxicating liquors; thousands, of course, have solemnly but terribly wrestled with the deadly enemy and conquered; many thousands maintain “the irrepressible conflict” with various degrees of success; but the prison and the almshouse records show that with another class, mighty in number and important in interest, resistance is relinquished, shame forgotten, and the daughter, the wife and the mother confess themselves the captives of that one vice which sacrifices every female virtue to the gratification of rapacious appetite. This subject commends itself to the regard of the philanthropist, it calls for the attention of the magistrate, and it asks for some new legislation; what that legislation should be in detail, we do not pretend to say; our duty in the capacity in which we now act is done when we thus expose the evils whose existence and a part of whose terrible effects we discern in our prison visitations. We do not exaggerate the means nor the devotion to drunkenness in what we here state. The inducements to intoxication are double those which we have mentioned, and all vices and passions are made subservient to the work of selling liquor, while the effect of the poison sold is promotive of other vices. The accursed bottle is not confined to the house, the cellar, the dram shop, nor the saloon, it follows the miserable devotee to the police station, and the very van in which the drunkard is conveyed to the prison has its illicit bottle, so that if a single one of the inebriates should have failed of the necessary quantity for entire intoxication, or one should have recovered a gleam of reason, there should not be wanting the means of completing or restoring the work; and, it may be added, that it is with the utmost vigilance that the officers of the prison are enabled to keep intoxicating liquors from the cells. It is a melancholy fact that the husband endeavors to smuggle a contraband bottle into the cell where his wife is confined for drunkenness; and mothers while lamenting the hereditary misconduct of their daughters, seek to convey comfort to the young offender in the form of coffee strongly “laced” with whiskey.