mation they are simply armies of vicious, wicked persons, who are so from love of the bad and free choice of evil. This idea prevails in the court-room, and the judge, with a farcical stupidity, admonishes, rebukes, and sentences these poor victims, who are supposed to be made better by the moral and physical surroundings of the prison, and the sufferings which the vengeance of the law inflicts. The case may have appeared many times before for the same offense, and the act committed may have been particularly insane and motiveless, and yet the judge deals out justice on the legal theory that the prisoner is of sound mind, and fully conscious and responsible. The result is clearly seen in the records of police courts, showing that the number of persons who are repeatedly arrested for drunkenness is increasing. Another result more startling, but equally true, appears. Every law court where inebriate maniacs are tried and punished, on the theory that drunkenness is no excuse for crime, and that the victim should be treated as of sound mind, with free will to do differently, is a court of death, more fatal than all the saloons and beer-shops in the world. Such courts destroy all possibility of restoration, and precipitate the victim to lower grades of degeneration. It has been estimated that ninety-nine out of every one hundred men who are arrested for drunkenness for the first time, and sentenced to jail, will be returned for the same offense within two years, and appear again with increasing frequency as long as they live. The report of the hospital at Deer Island, near Boston, where drunkards are sent on short sentences, for 1883, showed that one man had been sentenced to this place for the same offense, drunkenness, seventy-five times. Before the temperance committee of the English Parliament, in 1882, many cases were cited of men who had been sent to jails and work-houses from twenty to two hundred times for drunkenness. Practically, every sentence for drunkenness for ten, thirty, or sixty days, costs the tax-payers from fifty to one hundred and fifty dollars; and more completely unfits the victim for and removes him from the possibility of living a temperate, healthy life. Enthusiastic temperance men have drawn the most startling conclusions from these lower court records of arrests for drunkenness. Here each arrest stands for a new man and case. The nine thousand cases recorded as having been sent to Deer Island in 1883 in reality only represent a little over two thousand different men and women, and yet the number of arrests is taken as evidence of the increase of drunkenness.
A third class of inebriate maniacs are less common, and yet they often come into great notoriety from some unusual act or crime. They are known as moderate or occasional excessive users of alcohol; or opium and chloral takers. In most cases they are from the middle and better classes of society, and are beyond all suspicion of insanity, and their uses of these drugs are considered mere moral lapses. Such persons will suddenly exhibit great changes of character and conduct,
