This type of woman, dependent upon the love and affection of her husband for her health and strength, mental and physical, is the type that woman’s education and training, at least in the past, have tended to make.  She has not been taught, she has not the power, to stand in life alone; she is the clinging vine to the man’s oak, she is the traditional woman.  She is happy and well with the right man, but Heaven help her if the marriage ceremony links her with a philanderer!  For she has been taught to accept as true and right that mischievous couplet: 

  Love is of man’s life a thing apart,
  ’Tis woman’s whole existence.

We need for our womanhood a braver standpoint than that, one more firmly based, less apt to bring failure and disaster.  For neither man nor woman should love be the whole existence.  It should be a fundamental purpose interwoven with other purposes.

Fortunately one source of domestic difficulty will soon pass from America,—­alcoholism.  Politicians and theorizers may speak of the blow to individual liberty and satirically prophesy that soon coffee and tobacco will be legislated out also.  They need to read Gilbert Chesterton and learn that though “a tree grows upward it stops growing and never reaches the sky.”  To see, as I do, the almost complete absence of delirium tremens from the emergency and city hospitals, where once every Sunday morning found a dozen or two of raving men; to witness the disappearance of alcoholic insanity from our asylums, where once it constituted fifteen per cent of the male admissions; to see cruelty to children drop to one tenth of its former incidence; to know that former drunkards are steadily at work to the joy of their wives and the good of their own souls,—­this is to make one bitterly impatient with the chatter about the “joy and pleasure of life gone,” etc. etc., that has become the stock-in-trade of the stage and the press.  Though alcoholism did not cause all poverty, it stupefied men’s minds so that they permitted much preventable poverty; though it did not cause all immorality, a few drinks often sent a good man to the brothel; and what is more, many of the brothel inmates endured their life largely because of the stupefying use of alcohol.

No one knows the evil of alcohol more than the poor housewife.  Of course the woman brought up to believe that drunkenness was to be expected in a man—­and who often drank with him—­was a victim without severe mental anguish, though her whole life was ruined by drink.  But for the refined woman who married a clean, clever young fellow only to have him come home some day reeking of liquor,—­silly, obscene, helpless,—­her contact with John Barleycorn took the joy and sweetness from her life.  She often adjusted herself, but in many cases adjustment failed, and a chronic state of bruised and tingling nervousness resulted.

A future generation will not consider it possible that the people of a century that saw the use of wireless, the airship, radium, and the X-ray could think intoxication with its literal poisoning funny, could make a stock humorous situation out of it, and could regard the habit-forming drug that caused it a necessity.