“It seems to me that gentlemen (I speak in the spirit), holding as their creed the duty of putting themselves in the place of others, cannot reconcile it with that creed to punish _for the mere sake of punishing_ those whose chances in life have been so vastly inferior to their own. “These general considerations must be platitudes to you, and I feel that you do not, any more than I, believe in punishment as a means of revenging society, but merely as a means of protecting society by restraining and trying to reform the offender. Society (I speak in the widest sense of heredity and environment) makes the offender; it can restrain, but it cannot with justice exact vengeance from the victims of its own shortcomings. “All hope of real diminution in crime and criminals (in default of better social conditions) depends, in my belief, not on the infliction of ‘deterrent suffering’ in prisons, but, _first_, on the extension of probation, and your splendid Borstal system; _secondly_, on abolition of ‘tickets of leave,’ and that vicious principle of not having done with the offence when you have paid the penalty for it; _thirdly_, on a moderate, humane, and reformatory use of the principle of detention of the hopeless recidivist; _fourthly_, on the increase of humanizing influences brought to bear on prisoners in prison. I give full weight to the necessity for not making prison life a treat, and to the consideration that what would be hell to us may be comparative ease to the habitual criminal; but I think that, with ‘closed-cell’ confinement abolished, society might still make its mind easy. The man who will come back to prison life from choice, so long as he can get his bread in freedom, does not exist; the cumulative force of hard and regular work, of silence, of no tobacco, of no drink, of no knowledge of what is going on outside, of being ordered about from morning to night, of being, a number, not a man, of losing all touch with his family and friends, above all, of utter monotony, of the sense at the best of being in school, at the worst of being in slavery, of the feeling of having whole years sponged out of his life (for a man does not _live_ in prison), may not be easy to grasp for those who live in liberty themselves, but it is none the less tremendous. “It is perhaps superfluous to remind you, who for so many years have been fighting for and achieving reforms, of what a queer, hypnotizing influence ‘things as they are’—in fact, the _existing system_ has on the minds of those who are constantly confronted with it; and to beg you for that reason to take due discount from the evidence of those who are necessarily under that hypnotic influence; just as no doubt you will, without my begging you, take discount from my appeal on the ground that I am an outsider.