Sir, Public Opinion has never yet succeeded in realizing what this so-called separate confinement means. In the year ending March, 1907, we set 1,035 persons, of whom 691 had never been sentenced to penal servitude before, to endure these hours of agony and demoralization. In the year ending March, 1908, we set another 1,179 to endure the same, 749 of them for the first time. At the present moment another thousand, more or less, are undergoing it. In thus subjecting year by year a thousand persons to nine, six, or three months of an “artificial state of existence absolutely opposed to that which Nature points out as the condition of mental, moral, and physical health,” we are annually committing an offence against our reason, of which we reap the full reward in the mental, moral, and physical deterioration of persons already demoralized enough; and an offence against our humanity in reality as great as if we had placed them on the rack. I by no means lose sight of the fact that this closed-cell confinement falls with different effect on different temperaments; it falls, no doubt, far less heavily on the sluggish and the brutalized than on the nervous types, of which, however, we are now breeding great numbers. But, sir, even the habitual criminal—popularly supposed to dread flogging more than anything—has been known while enduring solitary confinement to beg for the lash in place of it. Sir J. Jebb, giving evidence before the Penal Servitude Acts Commission in 1863, uses these words: “With burglars and reckless characters I think that separate confinement is dreaded more than any other kind of discipline.” And in regard to other effects on the habitual criminal, the words of Professor Prins, above quoted, are significant. The sluggish brutality of many recidivists is produced in the first place by this very process of closed-cell confinement. Man, even the lowest type of man, is a social and gregarious animal—all that is best in him depends on, and is brought out by, contact with his fellow-creatures; if that be not so, our religion and whole social scheme are falsely conceived. Deprive man of all contact with his fellow-man, shut him in upon himself, hopelessly, utterly, month by month, and he will come out of that artificial existence lower and more brutal than when he entered it. Prolonged starvation and agony of the mind is worse than starvation and agony of the body, carrying, as it does, the wreck of the body with it.