Some are found idiotic enough to invite such a fate, though fewer now than formerly. The progress of education in England during the last twenty years, and the philanthropic efforts of many societies and private persons, but above all the covert but successful efforts of the authorities to deport them to this country instantly after their release, have had an immense effect in thinning the ranks of prison inmates. The Judges, too, have been forced by public opinion to be much less severe than they used to be, and that counts for much even in the inside of prisons. Nothing can be more capricious than the sentences they pass. In very few cases does the law set any limit. "Life or any term not less than five years" is the usual reading of the statute books, and the consequence naturally is that one Judge will give his man five years, while another will condemn his to twenty years for precisely the same crime committed under precisely the same circumstances as the first one. Another great blot on the English judicial system is that no court of appeal exists to which a sentence might be referred for review, so that the most unjust and unequal sentences are constantly passed from which there is no appeal but in the forlorn hope--rather, entire hopelessness--of a petition to the Home Secretary. I have often seen a man who had been sentenced to five years for murder working by the side of another whose sentence was twenty years for some crime against property. Such contrasts, of course, excite great discontent, and in some cases are the reason why men set up a hopeless resistance to what they feel to be persecution and injustice. It always seemed to me that the standpoint of the Board of Directors, established in 1864, and which continued without change until very recently, was altogether wrong. They appeared to think that in their dealings with other men the only course was to be the application of "force, iron force," as one of the governors expressed it. The very great majority require no such application, and the few difficult ones could easily be managed in another way. Certainly it is necessary that all prison discipline be penal, but it is not necessary that it be ferocious and inhuman, as certainly is the English. Starvation, the crank, the plank bed, the fearful cold of the cells are not measures necessary in dealing with any man. Whatever they could think of to harden, to degrade, to insult, to inflict every form of suffering, both physical and mental, which a man could undergo and live, was embodied in the rules they made. Their prisons were to be places of suffering and of nothing but suffering.