INEBRIATE MANIACS. in 



mation they are simply armies of vicious, wicked persons, who are so 

 from love of the had and free choice of evil. This idea prevails in the 

 court-room, and the judge, with a farcical stupidity, admonishes, re- 

 bukes, and sentences these poor victims, who are supposed to be made 

 better by the moral and physical surroundings of the prison, and the 

 sufferings which the vengeance of the law inflicts. The case may have 

 appeared many times before for the same offense, and the act committed 

 may have been particularly insane and motiveless, and yet the judge 

 deals out justice on the legal theory that the prisoner is of sound 

 mind, and fully conscious and responsible. The result is clearly seen 

 in the records of police courts, showing that the number of persons 

 who are repeatedly arrested for drunkenness is increasing. Another 

 result more startling, but equally true, appears. Every law court where 

 inebriate maniacs are tried and punished, on the theory that drunk- 

 enness is no excuse for crime, and that the victim should be treated 

 as of sound mind, with free will to do differently, is a court of death, 

 more fatal than all the saloons and beer-shops in the world. Such 

 courts destroy all possibility of restoration, and precipitate the victim 

 to lower grades of degeneration. It has been estimated that ninety- 

 nine out of every one hundred men who are arrested for drunkenness 

 for the first time, and sentenced to jail, will be returned for the same 

 offense within two years, and appear again with increasing frequency 

 as long as they live. The report of the hospital at Deer Island, near 

 Boston, where drunkards are sent on short sentences, for 1883, showed 

 that one man had been sentenced to this place for the same offense, 

 drunkenness, seventy-five times. Before the temperance committee of 

 the English Parliament, in 1882, many cases were cited of men who 

 had been sent to jails and work-houses from twenty to two hundred 

 times for drunkenness. Practically, every sentence for drunkenness 

 for ten, thirty, or sixty days, costs the tax-payers from fifty to one 

 hundred and fifty dollars ; and more completely unfits the victim for 

 and removes him from the possibility of living a temperate, healthy 

 life. Enthusiastic temperance men have drawn the most startling 

 conclusions from these lower court records of arrests for drunkenness. 

 Here each arrest stands for a new man and case. The nine thousand 

 cases recorded as having been sent to Deer Island in 1883 in reality 

 only represent a little over two thousand different men and women, 

 and yet the number of arrests is taken as evidence of the increase of 

 drunkenness. 



A third class of inebriate maniacs are less common, and yet they 

 often come into great notoriety from some unusual act or crime. 

 They are known as moderate or occasional excessive users of alcohol ; 

 or opium and chloral takers. In most cases they are from the middle 

 and better classes of society, and are beyond all suspicion of insanity, 

 and their uses of these drugs are considered mere moral lapses. Such 

 persons will suddenly exhibit great changes of character and conduct, 



