A man is sent to prison because he has proved himself unfit to be at liberty. His attack upon society was evidence of this, and society punishes him by taking away the liberty which he has thus abused. His dread of the prison increases as he comes under the shadow of its grim walls, and, once having passed within, a feeling of remorse and desperation seizes him. Its intensity or weakness will depend upon his temperament. He is soon told in the most emphatic manner that he is to regard himself as a felon; that he is to live with felons as a felon and observe the habits of a felon. He is given a uniform coarse in texture clumsy and grotesque in appearance and branded over with the broad-arrow and with his prison number. In this garb it is impossible for a man to preserve his sense of self-respect. If he should not be amenable to the prison discipline he may be held up to ridicule by being compelled to wear a parti-coloured uniform. However can a man be expected to reform who is held up to the ridicule of felons? It matters not from which class of life he is drawn, what his age is, or the nature of his offence, he is thrown into the company of the worst criminals in the land. If he were a cultured man, or a man who had known no associates in his crime, or if his aesthetic taste was considerably developed it matters not; he must do the same work and mix in the same company as the most ignorant and most brutal. To utterly disregard these qualities is to ignore the wide-open channels along which the most powerful reformative influences may be transmitted. If his recovery is to be considered these are most substantial assets. They are, as it were, "the general health" of the patient suffering from a local lesion. Yet our prison system not only ignores them but patiently sets to work to destroy them, as if their possession were an additional offence on the part of the criminal. Prisoners who try to keep aloof from their associates may often be made to suffer very considerably for it. Others, craving for some association, soon fall in with men whom they would have regarded, a few days previously, as impossible companions. The almost entire absence of elevating influences makes it easy for the concentrated power of evil to become irresistible. The gloom of the prison rises, the fear of the law vanishes and the new born tendency to crime becomes a confirmed habit. A man needs either a very strong will indeed, or else to be supported by powerful social traditions to enable him to resist the evil influences of prison life. A few men do resist and maintain their sense of self-respect in spite of all indignities and bad influences. Some sink as under a torture; some sink and are enticed and absorbed into felony. These last will plan their future crimes while they are serving their first sentence. Henceforth the prison is their home.