A crushing indictment of the modern girl was uttered by Dr. J. S. Risien Russell, the neurologist, during an address at the Institute of Hygiene yesterday. Dr. Russell recalled a notorious legal case when a member of the medical profession said that women lived on excitement and kept themselves going by means of alcohol. Drugs, he said, might have been added, for evidently women were able to secure drugs to keep themselves going with little or no food and next to no sleep. The picture was distasteful to those who remembered the healthy lives that women lived formerly. The matter was degrading in women of mature years, but far more important was the case of the modern girl.

Whether or not the war was to be blamed for the change, the girl of the present day, even when still in her teens, had a freedom of action and liberty fraught with more than one danger. The chaperon was in the main a thing of the past, and young girls were free to go out with young men not only to restaurants and dances but to night clubs with no sort of restriction and no limit of time. The result was that the whole or the greater part of the night was spent in frivolity, with no time left for sleep, so that a day following this full round of social and other engagements could only be got through with the assistance of alcohol or drugs. Girls not long from school were to be seen drinking cocktails, champagne, and liqueurs, while in time whiskies and sodas were added to the list of stimulants required to keep them going. Scarcely had the age of twenty been reached before the lines that rightly belonged to the woman of middle-age had become evident in such girls.

Was it to be supposed that when girls of this kind reached womanhood and became mothers they could produce men and women with anything but the most miserable physique and of the neurotic type? It was certain that a considerable proportion of our girls acquired the habit of living on excitement so much so that they found themselves unable to break the habit and live a normal life with any prospect of happiness, and so unfitted themselves for motherhood and the duties and responsibilities of married life.

There was a happy mean at which to aim in the training of children, but it would be far better for their nervous systems were young people compelled to return to the strict discipline of the Victorian era than that things should remain as at present.