I met a lovely creature on the train, who had been married a few months.  Her husband was a lumber merchant in Chicago.  She sat by me and told me her sad story.  She had been a poor girl and dearly loved a man whose mother opposed the match and prevented the marriage.  The young lumber merchant, left rich by the death of his father, proposed and she married him.  In a month, the mother of the man she loved first, died and the obstacle was removed.  In telling me this story I smelled liquor on her breath.  She would say a few sentences and then say:  “Oh, Carry Nation I am so miserable!  If Charlie would only be true to me I would not grieve for the man I love, but Charlie drinks and he goes with other women, and leaves me alone.  He gives me all the money I want.  I have everything that money can buy; but, Oh!  I almost hate these things!  I had rather have a hut with someone to love me.”  She kept talking this way until it was enough to break my heart.  She said:  “Charlie will be in from the smoking car, and please Mrs. Nation speak to him.  I want to be a good wife and I will do all I can to make him a good man.  But he laughs at me when I talk to him, he never takes me in earnest.  Go speak to him.”

So I did.  I found him to be a young man about twenty-three, with the marks of dissipation on his face.  I said:  “I have something to say to you privately.  You have a beautiful young wife.  If you wish to make her happy you can do so.  There is one thing that will ruin the happiness of both.  That is intoxicating drink.  Did you know your wife is under the influence of some drug?” He said:  “Oh, don’t say a word to her about that, I am the cause of it.  I drink and have persuaded her to, because she has a right to do what I do.”

I told him of the fatal results and asked him to quit or it would be the ruin of both.  Here were these two on the brink of ruin, so young, so attractive.  I never shall forget the pathos of that woman’s story.  The yearning of that heart for love.  Of course in her unhappiness she would turn to the benumbing fascination of the poisonous drug.

On every hand I see the desolation of homes and hearts.  There are no five things that make so much enmity between the sexes as this one—­ the licensed saloon.  The home life is destroyed.  Men and boys are taken from home at the very time they ought to be there, after their work is done.  Families should gather in the evening to enjoy each other’s society.  It is said that Germans are the cruelest husbands on earth.  Their beer gardens have taken the place of firesides.  There are more insane and suicides in Germany than any nation on earth.  Alcoholism is a disease.  Men go to the Keeley cure and take different treatments to get cured.  This disease is killing more every year than the deadliest epidemic, and still not one of the senators or representatives will discuss this.  Roosevelt toured this country moralizing on different questions.  The nearest