FUMIGATING INEBRIATES.

Dunstan Times, Issue 2677, 4 August 1913, Page 7

FUMIGATING INEBRIATES.

Cleveland’s “Golden Rule” treatment of men and women who bar® transgressed the law in an inconsequential wav has been improved upon apparently by the late municipal innovation of El wood. Indiana. The city hag established a fumigating apparar tus and all prisoners of the tramp or plain-drunk variety are passed through the various “cogs” of the machine. When they are released they exude after the manner of those who have boon confined in hospitals for weeks and carry out with them the scent of carbolic acid and various other mixtures. It is expected that the odor will reveal the fact of arrest arid arouse the shame of the offender. Various experiments have been adopted in the past, both curative and preventive, in connection with men and women put in cells over night for minor offences. Originally £2 or tan days was held bo he the very last, beet word in penalty Infliction. Then folk* pointed out that the poor man hadn’t £2 to spare in most cases and if he was sent to gaol for ten days because ho couldn’t pay tliab his family suffered through his idleness and he might lose his employment altogether. Suspended sentence was then tried in a number of cities and this seemed in a great measure —when coupled with a sharp lecture —to approximate what was the best thing to do with the minor transgressor. Now and then n Western city magistrate would try a cure of his own. Tho cure would bo concededly an original one, no matter if it did ' not always prove efficacious. One judge sentenced an offender_ to scrub out half a dozen cells every night for a week after he had finished ms daily occupation outside the station house. Another judge in one of tho Pacific coast cities sentenced a man guilty of public intoxication twice a month to a two months’ attendance _at meetings of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. He was the only man present at several of these meetings and he did not like his corrective medicine at all, but he had to swallow it.

Still another magistrate gave a chronic inebriate the alternative of thirty days in gaol or buying and dia--1 rihnting a dozen temperance advocacy tracts every day for thirty days at specified addreses, where _it could be proved he had not called if he neglected the task. With the delivery of each tract ho was obliged to repeat the words; “Wine is a mocker ; strong drink is raging. Look not upon win© when ""it is red, for at last it biteth like an adder.” The cur© was tried after first administration upon several of the “chronics” and never failed to work from aix months to a year of reform.