What is to be done with offenders when their term of punishment has expired? This is a question which modern society finds it exceedingly difficult to solve. What is the use of punishing a delinquent for offences against the law if, the moment his sentence is completed, he is sent back again into the surroundings which led to his fall. So long as his surroundings are the same, his acts will be the same, unless his mind has passed through a revolution during detention in gaol. The latter event, it must be admitted, sometimes does happen, although it is not easy in these days to get the world to believe it. And when it does happen it is marvellous to see how men, through their own unaided efforts, will redeem their character and wipe out the blot upon their life. But many offenders pass through little or no change of mind, and unless delivered from their surroundings they will continue to fall. Here, however, comes in the difficulty. Many of these people love their surroundings; they have no desire to change; a life of squalor among squalid companions is not distasteful to them; on the contrary, they will refuse to leave old haunts no matter what inducements are offered them elsewhere. It is hardly possible to do anything with these offenders, and they unfortunately constitute at least one fourth of the criminal population. Such persons return again and again to prisons; and the manager of an important Prisoners' Aid Society in a great northern city, says, that to aid them "is a mere waste of money, if not an encouragement to vice."[48] How to deal with persons of this description is a most tantalising problem. More vigorous methods of punishment are sometimes advocated as the proper manner of deterring these habitual and incorrigible offenders, but if we consider the constitution and antecedents of most of them, it becomes perfectly certain that such means will not effect the end in view. As a matter of fact, most of them are not adapted to the conditions of existence which prevail in a free society. Some of them might have passed through life fairly well in a more primitive stage of social development, as, for example, in the days of slavery or serfdom, but they are manifestly out of place in an age of unrestricted freedom, when a man may work or remain idle just as he chooses. A society based upon the principle of individual liberty is a society of which the members are supposed to be gifted with the virtues of prudence, industry, and self-control; virtues of this nature are indeed essential to the existence of such a form of society. Unfortunately, a certain portion of its members do not possess them even in an elementary degree, and no amount of seclusion in prison will ever confer these qualities upon them. Imprisonment, to be followed by liberty, however rigorous it is made, is accordingly no solution of the difficulty; the only effective way of dealing with the incorrigible vagrant, drunkard, and thief, is by some system of