DRINKING AND PROSPERITY

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXV, Issue 10713, 22 October 1913, Page 2

DRINKING AND PROSPERITY

The official statistics published in an issue of the London Daily Mail show that the convictions for drunkenness were greater last year than in 1911 and that the convictions of women were at a higher rate than those of men. These facts have been received by social students without surprise, because it, is a well-known fact that an increase of prosperity tends to increase drinking. The most expert observers of modern life deny, however, that even with these greater convictions there is more drunkenness to-day. They say, and with some reason, that our police authorities have become stricter in arresting intoxicated people and that the standard of public sobriety has so risen that the man who twenty years ago would not have been noticed is now hurried to prison. The question of drinking among women is undoubtedly serious, and the more serious becaxise' we have not yet found a suocesisful way of dealing with the woman drunkard. The London County Council, after some years of experiment, has just closed its inebriate home for women. The home had been opened for ten years, and cost during that time about £IOO,000. Six hundred women were treated, and very few of these, even according ito» tthe official information available, received any permanent good. It is a commonplace with many who work among such women that the only hope of rescue lies in tremendously strong religious impulses. The curing of women inebriates is not a matter to be accomplished by official routine. This the County Council experiment has, at great cost, once more shown.