There is a class of individual loose upon society whose presence and significance in our midst seems, as yet, insufficiently and improperly appreciated. These people are usually of pleasant address, with all the outward show of civil social observance; they are fluent of speech, readily adaptable to circumstances, superficially in every way most plausible. How does it come, then, that on closer acquaintance they prove to be the scourge of their relations and friends; that many of them have a prisoner's acquaintance with the police courts; that they are frequently embezzlers of money; are guilty of theft, drunkenness, and immorality of every kind; that slander, with all its miserable train of disintegrating influences, emanates from them as a miasma? Punishment is no deterrent to their anti-social activities; they are supremely unaffected either by the teachings of past experience or the forewarnings of future suffering.