FUMIGATING INEBRIATES

Northern Advocate, 28 August 1913, Page 6

FUMIGATING INEBRIATES

Cleveland's "Golden Rule" treatment of men and women who have transgressed the law in an inconsequential way has been improved upon apparently by the late municipal innovation of Elwood, Indiana. The city ras established a fumigating apparatus 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 been confined in hospitals for 1 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 and arouse the shame of the offender. Various experiments have been adopted in the past, both curative l and preventive, in connection with men and women put in cells over night for minor offences. Originally £2 or ten days was held to be the very last, •best word in penalty infliction. Then folks 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 he couldn't pay that 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 a Western city magistrate would try a cure of his own. The cure would be 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 his daily occupation outside the station house. Another judge in one of the 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 sev : eral of these meetings and he did not like his corrective medicine at all, but be had to swallow it. 3t.il another magistrate gave a chronic inebriate the alternative of thirty days in gaol or buying and distributing a dozen temperance advocacy tracts every day for thirty days at specified addresses, where it could be Droved he had not called if he neglected the task. With .the delivery of each tract he was obliged to repeat the words: "Wine is a mocker; strong drink is raging. Look not upon the wine when it is red, for at last it biteth like an adder." The cure was tried after its first administration upon several of the "chronics" and never failed to work from six months to a year of reform.