I was struck with horror at the besotted condition of so many of the women--women who were bearing children every year, and suckling them, and who seemed to me little better than foul human stills through which the accursed liquor with which they were soaked filtered drop by drop into the little drunkards at their breasts. To these children drunkenness comes unconsciously, like their mother tongue. They cannot remember a time when it was new to them. They come out of the cloudland of infancy with the impression that drunkenness is one of the normal conditions of man, like hunger and sleep. This was written thirty years ago. It is said that conditions have greatly improved in recent years in respect to the amount of drunkenness among the poor of London. Nevertheless, I notice in the last volume of the "Annual Charities Register" for London the statement that inebriety seems to be increasing among women, and that it prevails to such an alarming extent among women in all ranks of society that "national action is becoming essential for the nation's very existence." The statistics of London crime show that, while only about half as many women as men are arrested on the charges of "simple drunkenness" and "drunkenness with aggravations," more than three times as many women as men are arrested on the charge of "habitual" drunkenness. Another thing that impressed me was that the American police courts deal much more severely with women. This is certainly true in the Southern States, where almost all the women brought before the police courts are Negroes. The class of people to whom I have referred represent, as a matter of course, the lowest and most degraded among the working classes. Nevertheless, they represent a very large element in the population, and the very existence of this hopeless class, which constitutes the dregs of life in the large cities, is an indication of the hardship and bitterness of the struggle for existence in the classes above them. I have attempted in what I have already said to indicate the situation of the women at the bottom in the complex life of the largest and, if I may say so, the most civilized city in the world, where women are just now clamouring for all the rights and privileges of men. But there are parts of Europe where, as far as I have been able to learn, women have as yet never heard that they had any rights or interests in life separate and distinct from those of their husbands and children. I have already referred to the increasing number of barefoot women I met as I journeyed southward from Berlin. At first these were for the most part women who worked in the fields. But by the time I reached Vienna I found that it was no uncommon thing to meet barefoot women in the most crowded and fashionable parts of the city.