At present the only public recognition of the alcoholic is manifested through some form of penalization. He loses his employment, he is excluded from respectable society, in extreme cases he is taken into court and subjected to reprimand, fine, or imprisonment. Nothing is done to bring about his reform except as the moral weight of the non-remedial punishment may arouse him to his peril and set his own will at work. Instances where this occurs are rare, because the crisis always comes when, through the influence which alcohol has wrought upon him, his brain has been befogged and his will weakened. Society does virtually nothing to awaken that will or to assist its operation. The man whose drinking has so disarranged him physically or mentally that he is obviously ill is, it is true, taken to the alcoholic ward of some hospital, but even there no effort is made to treat the definite disease of alcoholism. For example, Bellevue and Kings County hospitals, where New York's two "alcoholic wards" exist, are institutions devoted specially to the treatment of emergency cases. As a matter of course, the alcoholics taken to them are merely "sobered up." As soon as they are sobered and have achieved sufficient steadiness of nerve to make their discharge possible, they are turned out again into the liquor-ridden city, with their craving for the alcohol which has just mastered them no weaker, with their resolution to resist its urging no whit stronger, than they were before the crisis in their alcoholic history engulfed them. There is as yet no public institution in New York City where a man, either as a paying or as a charity patient, may go for medical treatment designed to alleviate the craving for liquor; no organized charity makes provision for the medical treatment of the alcoholic. Only three States in the Union attempt to provide more competently than New York State does for this class of unfortunates. The provision they make progressively treats men convicted of drunkenness in the courts with surveillance, threat, colonization, and finally perpetual exclusion from society. Massachusetts has a colony for inebriates, New York is developing one, and Iowa has had one for several years.