Such are the women who come within the provisions of the Habitual Inebriates Act of 1898. These are the women who come before our magistrates four times in one year. These are the women of whom the State says to philanthropic societies of private individuals: ‘Take them off our hands. Cure them of inebriety. Keep them for one, two, or three years, and you shall have ten and sixpence per week for each of them.’ And local bodies say: ‘Take them, treat them for the drink craze, and we will supplement the State payments by six and sixpence per week for each.’ Seventeen shillings per week paid by the community, plus the labour of the individual, for sensually possessed or demented women to be cured of drunkenness! To such wisdom have we attained! Deliberately and emphatically I say, and I say it with some knowledge and great experience of these women, that drink is not the root cause of their condition. They drink because they must drink; their hunting-ground is the public-house, their prey the drink-excited male.
A friend of mine took a young woman of this class, who had been to prison a hundred times, into his service. There, with good wages and a comfortable home, shielded from the temptation to drink, with no possibility of indulging grosser passions, she tried to hang herself and was taken to an asylum. After three months’ detention I brought her away and cared for her. She stayed with us a few days and left us suddenly, not to drink, but to revel in impurity. Sadly but earnestly I say that philanthropic societies cannot restrain, discipline, and control these women. The State, and the State alone, can deal with them with any hope of success, and medical men who have made a study of sensuality and dementia should have charge of them in institutions where they can be properly classified, studied, and treated, for the hopeless scandal of their present lives ought not to continue. But to commit such women to ‘inebriate reformatories’ for one year or two, and then send them back to their old haunts and old vices, is not only supremely ridiculous but stupidly cruel--ridiculous, because the community has to pay about fifty pounds for a penniless and homeless woman to be conveyed to and kept at a reformatory for one year where her condition is not diagnosed; cruel, because these women come back to the same old conditions from which they were taken away. The Act is but eighteen months old, and they are coming back, back to their sensuality, back to the wild and fierce grossness of the street, back to the police courts and to prison--for this has been the case with several. Can it be right? Is it just to the community or to the individual directly concerned that a woman should be taken from her horrible life for a year, and at the end of that year be again launched into the abyss of uncleanness? The community, having borne the cost, has a right to demand, and I hope it will demand, that before any woman is discharged from any inebriate reformatory some provision is made for her, and that at least a chance of living a clean life is presented to her. If she accepts the opportunity, well; if not, the State ought to know how to deal with her.