severe restrictions have been placed upon the sale of intoxicating liquor. In previous years, in times of industrial prosperity and plentiful wages, convictions for drunkenness have been enormous, and have obscured the decrease which has taken place, as a result of prosperity, in other offences, _e.g._, Vagrancy, and petty larceny. In his Report for 1909, Dr. Branthwaite, the Inspector under the Inebriates Acts, furnishes a most valuable and interesting analysis of the life history and mental and physical conditions of 1,031 persons. This investigation was conducted by himself personally, and throws a flood of light on the nature of the problem to be dealt with. He states that as a result of his inquiry, "three points of vital importance stand out clearly--(1) the close association between inebriety and psycho-neurotic disturbance, (2) the physical unfitness resulting from a life of uncontrolled inebriety, and (3) the necessity for the organisation of more suitable methods for dealing with persons who offend against law and order by reason of habitual drunkenness." "The presence of obvious mental defect in a large proportion of cases, and (in cases not obviously defective) the criminal tendencies, the proneness to immorality, the uneducability, the early age at which disorderly habits commence, the ease with which all inmates become excited by alcohol, and their unreasonable behaviour in a hundred different ways, are conclusive evidences of the existence of a mental state far removed from normal, in nearly all cases committed to Reformatories. To attempt to attribute all such conditions to vicious indulgence in alcohol is absurd; they existed in the large majority of cases long before drunkenness appeared, or they developed _pari passu_ with the drunkenness from a common cause. When mental defect is obvious, it will usually be found responsible for the drunkenness; when not sufficiently definite to be recognised, a modified morbid strain, a heredity of disorder, a psycho-neurotic fault, a constitutional peculiarity, call it what we may, will generally be discovered as the key to the position." His condemnation of short sentences in Prison as a cure for inebriety in all its forms is expressed as follows:--