ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an address concerning the inebriates of the New York State Inebriate Asylum, published in Atlantic Monthly, April 1869. The address focuses on the “business and the bosoms” of the State’s anxious, patient clients, — parents and wives and children and friends, — between whom and these inebriates she stands in trust. The state stands in trust, and gets a plain, unreserved, and cheering, view of the interior aspects of this House: the Inebriate at Home, from the moment when the Asylum welcomes the coming guest, prostrated in body and soul, to that in which it bids God-speed to his parting. The address shows how all this can be and is done in the Asylum by the aid of no machinery more complicated than that with which the Creator has provided us from the beginning, in the kindly impulses and grateful aspirations of our own hearts, all ticking in tune together.
