But the Licensing Act of 1902 dealt with another class of women inebriates, and dealt with them in a drastic but unsatisfactory way. The law got hold of really drunken women this time, but it did not give them half the consideration extended to gross and demented unfortunates. It empowered magistrates to grant separation orders between married couples when either husband or wife became habitually drunken. In this Act the same definition of habitual inebriety that governed the 1898 Act was adopted, and husbands very promptly began to demand separation orders on account of their wives' drunkenness. My experiences of the result of this Act are sorrowful to a degree; but I expected those results, for I knew that the clauses that empowered separation orders must be either inoperative or disastrous. Alas! they did not remain inoperative, for the number of discarded wives began quickly to multiply.
When the Bill was before Parliament I spent some weeks in a vain endeavour to prevent some of the worst consequences that I knew would follow, and have followed. I contributed several articles to leading reviews; I wrote to _The Times_ and scores of other influential papers; I wrote to leaders of temperance societies; I circularized the Members of both Houses, pointing out the enormity and the absurdity of putting drunken wives homeless on the streets; I pleaded, I begged, with heart, voice, and pen, for just one chance to be given the miserable women. My efforts were vain. No one supported me. I was a voice crying in the wilderness. It might be thought that I was asking for some great thing or some silly thing. I asked for neither. Let my readers judge. We had established inebriate reformatories at the public cost. We were filling them with the grossest unfortunates, of whom there was no hope of redemption; these women we were maintaining for two or three years in comfort. Will it be believed? I asked that drunken, but not immoral, women should be given equal chances of reformation. I asked that when a wife's drunkenness was proved, that she should, whether she consented or not, be committed for one year to an inebriate reformatory, and that the husband's contribution for her support should be paid to the institution that controlled her. But the House of Commons would have none of it; the House of Lords would not entertain it; the Christian Churches would not support it; the guardians of public morality ignored it. Drunken wives, though physically weak and ill, though mothers of young children, though decent in other ways, were not to be allowed one chance of reformation, were not to be considered for one moment worthy of treatment equal to that given to demented and gross women of the streets. "Pitch them out!" said our lords and gentlemen of both Houses. "Get rid of them!" said the Christian Churches. Husbands have not been slow in taking this advice, for they have been pitching wives out and have been getting rid of wives ever since. But the public do not get rid of them so easily. It has to bear the burden that cast-off wives bring, and that burden grows with every separation granted; so wives hitherto moral are fast qualifying for the legal advantages given to unspeakable women, and by-and-by, when the cast-out women behave themselves sufficiently badly, and the police take them into custody four times in a year--then, and not till then, when it is too late, both Houses of Parliament, the Christian Churches, and the guardians of public morality offer them the reforming influences of an institution for the cure of inebriety.