From being the most sober country France has become the most drink-consuming of any in Europe. The change, which has come about in the last twenty or thirty years, is usually attributed to the freedom given to open htcabarets rig and left. In some streets in Paris the houses where drink can be obtained are as numerous as the others. Some country districts are decimated with the evil as the peasant when inclined that way absorbs terrible quantities of absinthe which, in its cheaper and adulterated form, is the most deadly of poisons. Some departments show fifty per cent of conscripts unable to pass the medical examination for entrance to the army; consumption and kindred maladies are making groat and unprecedented ravages. Mad-louses are full of victims of the drink craze. A melancholy instance is afforded by the case of the son of the poet Verlaine who has just been sent to a maison do santo as the insane asylum is euphemistically called. The unfortunate man's father, like Miirger, the author of the incomparable " Vie de Bohéme" giving so lively a picture of the old Latin Quarter, and the post, Alfred de Musset, was given to intemperance. Miirger it was who bestowed upon absinthe the title of the Goddess with the Green Eyes; de Musset's favourite compound was absinthe mixed with beer, which he would drink by the hour together at the Cafe de la Régence hard by the Comédie Frangaise. Happily there are signs of a reaction against this new national failing, philanthropic societies are actively stirring up public opinion against an il which, if not checked, will rapidly result in the wholesale physical degeneration of the French people.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.