Rensselaer Republican, Volume 13, Number 14, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 December 1880 — Womau and Wine. [ARTICLE]

Womau and Wine.

Africaltoro World. A writer in Scribner’s Monthly uses the following strong language, which will be responded to by the women who have suffered all over the land. “Of the worst foes that woman has ever had to encounter, wine stands at the head. The appetite for strong drink in men has spoiled the lives of more women—ruined more hopes for them,scattered more fortunes for them, brought to them more shame, sorrow, and hardships—than any other evil that lives. The country numbers tens of thousands—nay,, hundreds of thousands of women who are widows to-day, and sit in hopeless weeds, because their husbands have been slain by strong drink.” “Yes, there are hundreds of thousands of homes, scattered all over tlie land, in which women live lives of torture, going through all the changes of suffering that lie between the extremes of fear and dispair. because those whom they love, love wine better than they do'the woman they have sworn to love, j There are women by tlie thousands who dread to hear at tlie door, the step that once thrilled them with pleasure; tlie step lias learried to reel under the influence of the seductive poison. There are women groaning with pain, while we write these words, from bruises and brutalities inflicted by husbunds made mad by drink. There can be no exaggeration in any statement made in regard to this matter, lieeause no human imagination can create any tiling worse than the truth, and no pen is capable of portraying tlie truth, Tlie sorrows of a wife with a drunken husband, or a mother witii a drunken son, are as near the realization of hell as can lie reached, in this world at least. The shame, the indignation, the -sorrow, the sense of disgrace for herself ana children, the poverty—and not unfirequently the beggary —the fear and the fact of violence, the lingering, lifelong struggle and despair of countless women With drunken husbands, are enongh to make all women curse wine, and engage unitedly to oppose it everywhere as the worst enemy of their sex, “Nothing,” said an impatient husband, “reminds me so much of Balaam and Ills ass as two women stopping In church and obstructing the way to indulge in their everlasting talk.” “But, you forget, my dear,” returned the wife, meekly, “that it was the angel who stopjied the way, and Balaam and his ass who complained of it.”