We are too much bound by precedent. Appropriate action is sometimes checked by the consideration that the thing proposed has never been done before. Of course that is no reason for not doing it now; but it takes the place of a reason in far too many cases. More interest is taken in proposals for dealing with the habitual offender than in any others, although nobody is a habitual to begin with. He is supposed to be the dangerous person. He is a professional plunderer; the villain of the piece. But habitual offenders are not all great criminals. There are those who live by stealing, having become more or less expert at the business; but there are many offenders who, having become careless and drunken, or who, being physically or mentally a little below the ordinary standard of their class, are incapable of keeping a job even if they got it. They are more a nuisance than a danger to their fellow-citizens. This army of destitute persons should be dealt with by the destitution authorities. Taken singly they are not difficult to control and direct, and it would be cheaper and more profitable to have them planted out in the country than to allow them to herd together in the cities, to be successful neither in honest nor dishonest work, and serving as tools and touts for the more skilful rogues. The most helpless among them are the aged and infirm, some of whom have only become submerged late in life, and all of whom are quite unable to extricate themselves from the morass into which they have fallen. Now they are in the prison; now in the poorhouse. When they can avoid either of these institutions they live in lodging-houses or on the streets, where their misery is a reproach to our civilisation. They are not interesting; they are only disgusting; and it has been proposed to shut them up in the poorhouse, because they go in and out too frequently.