usually somewhat different. Women are driven to drink by ill-treatment, or insufficiency of food, or both. When the husband drinks, or trade is slack, the wages which reach the hands of the poor wife and mother are inadequate to meet the wants of the family. The husband will be fed; the children must be fed; and the mother is happy if there remain for her a crust of bread and a cup of tea. In the condition of exhaustion induced by poor living, many working women seize any opportunity of tasting the stimulants which afford them some temporary relief. It is of the greatest importance that the coffee, tea, and cocoa sold at Coffee Publichouses should be of such quality that their sustaining power may be acknowledged by persons who have been previously accustomed to the use of intoxicating drinks.
If the working man be unmarried, living in a solitary lodging, he has even more need of society than the married man, and if he can find it only at the publichouse, he soon contracts the habit of going there. His career and its end are thus eloquently pictured by Miss Nightingale in a letter addressed to the Duke of Westminster, President of the Coffee Publichouse Association, and which she has kindly permitted to be published:—
The Coffee Publichouse Association.
Dear Duke of Westminster,—You were so good as to speak to me about the subject of your Committee on Intemperance once, and to send me your Blue-book. 'God Speed,' with all my heart, to your 'Coffee Publichouse Association,' with all the heart of an old nurse like me, appalled with the diseases of hospitals, and especially of workhouse infirmaries, where the young-men patients—at least a very large proportion—come in from 'the drink,' and worse, come in again and again from 'the drink,' knowing that it will be 'the drink' again which brings them there, and will bring them there as long as they live; helpless and hopeless to save themselves, knowing that they are caught and will be caught (like Hindoo ryots in the moneylender's clutch) in the same desperate trap, which, like the Indian moneylender, extorts a higher and a higher rate of usury every year—another pound of flesh—to their dying day.
