The official reports of Girgenti Inebriate Home were a great deal more satisfactory than the results, and the home might have been in existence yet if the representatives of the public had not informed themselves of the real state of affairs. A few cures are put to its credit at a calamitous expense. The cost of keeping a woman there amounted to between twenty-five and thirty shillings per week, and the odds were proved to be against her being reformed after three years' treatment. In other words, the public were guaranteed that all persons sent to the home could be kept sober at a cost of from sixty-five to eighty pounds each per year, but they had no reason to believe that when this payment ceased on their part the patient would take her place in the community and remain a sober citizen. If she was not made better, did she become worse as a result of her treatment there? In some respects she did. You cannot meddle with the lives of others without result, for it is impossible to leave them as you find them. I remember being visited one morning by a woman who had left the home after a three years' stay there. She had been drinking before she called on me, and she had some complaints to make regarding her treatment there. The complaints were trifling in character, and were more in the nature of gossip than anything else. I told her that she had cost the community some £200 to keep her during the last three years, and they seemed to have made a bad bargain. I advised her to think a little less of her grievances and a little more of the comfort of her neighbours, and dismissed her with the usual censure and advice; but she had a case against the State, although she was not able to express it clearly. I would put it for her thus: "When you interfered with my life I had fallen into the habit of drinking, but in the main I earned my own living and meddled very little with others to their annoyance. I had my friends, whom your judgment might not approve, but between them and myself there were common ties. We sympathised with each other and helped each other. You undertook to reform my life, to break me of my bad habits, to make me more fit to earn my living without offending against your laws. You have ruled and governed me for three years. You put me in a home where my life was regulated for me; you gave me as companions people with whom I had never associated before; you compelled me to live in their company; you taught me nothing that I find of any use to me outside; you kept me from drinking. It may have been a poor pleasure, but it was the only one I had. You did not take the taste for it away, and you have given me nothing to replace it; and now I am three years older, and you turn me loose on the streets of the city to which I belong, and in which I am now through your action very much a stranger, and invite me to work for my living in competition with others. I could work and did work before you meddled with me; I could work yet,