Mr. Obermair quickly dispensed with dogs, and nearly all the guards. He gradually relaxed the harsh system, and treated the prisoners with a consideration that gained their confidence. In the year 1852 Mr. Baillie Cochrane visited the prison, and his account is as follows: “The gates were wide open, without any sentinel at the door, and a guard of only twenty men idling away their time in a room off the entrance hall.... None of the doors were provided with bolts and bars; the only security was an ordinary lock, and as in most of the rooms the key was not turned, there was no obstacle to the men walking into the passage.... Over each workshop some of the prisoners with the best characters were appointed overseers, and Mr. Obermair assured me that when a prisoner transgressed a regulation, his companions told him ‘_es ist verboten_,’ and it rarely happened that he did not yield to the will of his fellow-prisoners. Within the prison walls every description of work is carried on ... each prisoner by occupation and industry maintains himself. The surplus of his earnings is given him on release, which avoids his being parted with in a state of destitution.” (This account is taken from Herbert Spencer’s _Essay on Prison Ethics_.) It is then clearly proved by actual experience that rough handling and brutal words—bolts and bars and bloodhounds—are alike unnecessary in the case of first offenders and in the case of the “desperate gang.” But, turning once more from the criminal to the ultimate causes of crime, these are—destitution, or more or less grinding poverty, inherited disease, ignorance and all the degraded nurture that crushes the humanities and develops the brutalities of man. A scientific treatment of crime will eradicate these various causes of crime. No summary methods are applicable. There is no short cut to the end in view; but by patient perseverance in the scientific meliorism indicated in my chapters on Industrial Life, Sex Relations and Parentage, and to be further explained in those on Education and Home Life, the forces brought into play will prove effective in social redemption. They are essentially radical and all-embracing. Within reformatories and prisons there may be partially supplied the training for forming and reforming character that is nowhere present in the homes and schools of the lower classes to-day. Those criminals who are not structurally defective may recover moral health, and become virtuous or at least harmless social units. In all such cases liberty should be restored; but the State can never be justified in discharging its rescued criminals without resources and without protection. They must be supplied with work, i.e. some means of self-support, and guarded from dangers besetting the critical period of liberation. The educating of ignorant criminals, the reforming of corrigible criminals, the restraining from further crime of incurable criminals—these are duties of the State.