confined to them, and gave the following figures for a period of ten years:

Persons apprehended in Liverpool in ten years

The tendency of women to monopolise the field of habitual inebriety among the working classes is an important fact which is not sufficiently realised, It is due mainly, perhaps wholly, to their addiction to spirits, which in England are only drunk by a few special classes of men in that rank of life. Habitual inebriety among men is far more common in the upper and middle classes, which are more given to spirits and less to beer. However, I am not discussing that point at present. I only wish to lay stress on the prevalence of habitual inebriety in

women as a reason for their failure to improve in sobriety so quickly as men.

It is not a new thing. I have given sufficient evidence in the previous chapters to show that female drinking and drunkenness are very oldestablished features of social life in this country. Dr. Norman Kerr's belief that some years ago women were never seen in the public-house is a strange delusion. They have been in the habit of frequenting that institution for a couple of centuries at least, and apparently in far greater numbers than in the present day. We have a pretty continuous record of their habits in that respect for the last seventy years at any rate. It is amusing to hear philanthropic ladies expatiating on the 'modern' construction of public-houses, the separate entrances, private bars, and other wily devices to entice women. They do not know that the same things were described in almost identical terms from the magisterial bench in 1830, when the greater number' of cases brought up at Bow Street were women. Then there was Mr. Moore's public-house census in 1834, which gave a daily average for each house of 2,749 customers, of whom 1,114 were women, or not far short of half. This is corroborated by the police returns. Out of 38,440 persons apprehended 16,780, or 43 per cent., were women, while the disorderlies numbered 5,178 women to 3,382 men. The police record is continuous since then, and women have always borne their share of the charge-sheet year by year. The question has cropped up at each of the inquiries

periodically held, and evidence of their drinking habits has always been forthcoming. In 1854 a public-house census in Manchester gave 44,838 female to 78,168 male customers, and a Mr. Balfour deposed that he had known women go in with children in their arms and get drunk at the bar, and had seen them come out and fall down with those children.' Again in 1876 the House of Lords Committee thought female intemperance was increasing because in some places the women nearly equalled the men. Apparently they were not aware that the same state of things had been demonstrated forty years before. Indeed, the more closely the facts are examined the more clearly they point to the conclusion that so far from women having recently taken to frequenting the public-house they have never frequented it less. It is to be regretted that the Royal Commission should have given currency and authority to an erroneous opinion which a moderate acquaintance with easily accessible facts would have enabled them to correct.

CHAPTER V

THE FORCES OF TEMPERANCE

THE ostensible agencies by which temperance has been directly promoted in this country are the organised societies and the liquor laws, the one acting by voluntary, the other by compulsory means. Many appear to think them the only agencies. Thus they speak of the temperance movement' and 'temperance progress as synonymous with the operations of the societies, and consider a reform of the liquor laws 'the one thing needful to make everybody sober. It is worth while, therefore, to inquire how far and in what way the societies and the law have been instrumental in effecting that improvement which I have already shown to have taken place during the last fifty or sixty years.

Temperance Societies. So long as drunkenness has existed there have been men who have denounced and combated it-priests, lawgivers, sages, and physicians and in a sense, therefore, the temperance movement' is as old as the evil itself; but the institution of organised societies for the promotion of sobriety belongs to the nineteenth century. Their history in this country falls into three periods. The

first covered about fifteen years, from 1829 to 1844, and was marked by great activity and success; the second, of about equal length, from 1844 to 1860, was a period of reaction, decline, and failure; the third, which has lasted until now, brought a revival of interest and activity, but on somewhat different lines. It will suffice for the present purpose to run briefly through the three periods and point out their main features.

At its outset the movement was mainly or wholly religious in character, at least religion was its animating principle. According to Dr. Dawson Burns, whose Temperance History'-a sort of annual record of the doings of the societies-is the chief authority on the subject, we originally borrowed the idea from America, where isolated attempts at organisation were carried on here and there during the first quarter of last century, and eventually took definite shape in the American Temperance Society, founded in 1826 by ministers of religion. They were imitated by the Rev. Dr. Edgar, of Belfast, who, together with other Presbyterian clergymen, established in 1829 the Ulster Temperance Society,' the first central body of the kind in these islands, although for some years small semi-private associations had been formed in different places in Ireland, of which the earliest is said to have been a club started by a working man at Skibbereen, near Cork. After the foundation of the Ulster Temperance Society' the movement developed very rapidly. By the end of the year there were twenty-five societies