The imprisonment and reimprisonment of the habitual offender had become a scandal. It was recognised that inebriety made men and women a danger and a nuisance to the family and their neighbours, but no greater a nuisance than the system by which we dealt with them. Everybody agreed that imprisonment made them no better. It made them abstainers only for the time they were in custody, but it did nothing to destroy the desire for drink. So an Act of Parliament was passed to enable them to be placed in an institution of another sort. If the prison failed to reform them, the Inebriate Homes have proved a more costly, a more ghastly failure. Instead of finding out the cause of the failure, a departmental committee, after examining anybody but those who had been in the homes, has recommended that further parliamentary powers should be granted to the committees managing them and courts sending inmates to them. The rational method of procedure would have been for intelligent and impartial persons to examine those cases which had been improved, and to estimate how far the improvement was due to the treatment received. This would not have been a difficult task, for the cases were few; and having accomplished it, it would have been equally profitable to examine the many cases of failure and to seek the causes of that failure. It is much easier, however, to collect the opinions of officials, of philanthropists, of those who are interested in prescribing for the conduct of others--in short, of people who are called authorities on a given subject, because nobody has been bold enough to challenge them--than to obtain the confidence and open the mouths of those whose wrongdoing it is sought to correct. It is a grotesque statement that the Inebriate Home failed because the wrong people were sent to it; also it is not true. It would be nearer the mark to say that the home failed because it was not suited for the treatment of inebriates. For after all, the very people for whom it was designed to afford treatment were among those sent there. The patients chosen for treatment in the Inebriate Home were carefully selected by a physician experienced in the treatment of mental diseases. Some of them were mentally affected as a consequence of their drunkenness, and there is room for supposing that some took to drink partly on account of a mental defect; but inebriety is not a physical disease, it is not a mental disease, although it may have some relationship to physical and mental diseases. It was because of its being a social disorder that the State undertook to consider these persons. This being so, each case could only be rationally considered in relation to the social condition of the inebriate. Information about the state of their various internal organs might be useful, but it could never replace in importance or interest information as to their social condition.