but I must have something to fill my life as well as work, and I have taken to drink again, because it is the only thing I know that meets the need I feel. I am worse off than I was before you started to reform me. Then I had friends, now I am alone; for they have gone their own way: some to death, all of them from me. There is nobody from whom I can have the sympathy and the help I once had. My friends had their faults and they knew mine; that was why we were friends. All you can offer me is patronage, advice, direction from people whom I don't know and who don't know me. The one thing that I want, which is fellowship, I have not got. You have taught me to depend on others. You have made me obey your rules, and now you set me free to make rules for myself, and leave me to drift back into the place where I was; to face the same difficulties, the same temptations, without the companionship of those who had grown into my life. You have taken three years from my life and you have given me nothing for it. Give me back my life or justify your interference with it by fitting me to become a better citizen than I was." This is something like what the woman appeared to feel and tried to say, and there is really no answer to it. It is not a wise proceeding to treat the lives of men and women as toys with which we can play, and throw them aside without practical regard for consequences when we are tired of the game. If we do not direct them, they will direct themselves, and the less fitted they are to do so the worse for us. I remember one woman who was an inmate of a home, but who had been employed on a farm outside under licence. Her behaviour was excellent; she was a good worker, although she had had over a hundred convictions for drunkenness before her admission to the home. She always had been a good worker in the intervals between the drinks. She conformed to the terms of the licence, whatever these were, and seemed to be a reformed character. I suggested to her that it was perfectly clear that, though she could not resist the temptations incident to life in the slums of a great city, she might continue for an indefinite period to live a useful life in the country. She replied, "As soon as my three years are up I am going back to the town," and she kept her promise, with the result that she went back to her drinking. In her case it was proved that she could behave for a long period when the only alternative presented to a regulated life outside an institution was a more rigidly regulated life inside an institution. She preferred the outside farm to the home, but she preferred the streets of the city to either, and her case raises the question whether it is advisable to withdraw all control from those like her. She did not require to be continually overlooked by officials in order that she should conform to the law. Her life was left under the inspection of the inhabitants of the district in which she