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 worked, and it is quite conceivable that she might have been working there yet, if she had not known that the reward of restraining herself would be not so much a change in character, as freedom from any supervision when a fixed term had expired.
The cause of the failure of the Inebriate Home did not lie in the character of the inmates or of the officials who were placed over them, but in the defect inherent in all institutions; the fact that the manner of living in them differs essentially from anything that obtains outside. They are all founded more or less on the military model, and the military model and the industrial model are different. Far more than most of us suspect we are the creatures of habit:--often of habit acquired slowly, gradually, and unconsciously. To remove ourselves from one place to another implies the breaking off from some habits, but it also implies the formation of others. It did not need the experience of the Inebriate Home to let us know that men might be removed from the opportunity of drinking for long periods and, on return to their former conditions, resume the habit. Years of imprisonment, where teetotalism is rigidly enforced and where the diet is of a non-stimulating character, did not make the men who were submitted to it abstain from drinking on their release. The objectionable habit can only be cured through being replaced by something which is of equal interest, has greater power, and enables the man to live his life without being a nuisance to his neighbours.