Captain Maconochie's system may be divided into two distinct and very different parts; namely, the general principles and the details. Concerning the latter, we are unwilling to hazard an opinion, deeming them peculiarly a matter of experiment, and incapable of proof or refutation by any other test than experience. But principles are universal, and, if true, may always be supported by argument, and strengthened by discussion; those of the Mark System, we think, will bear the application of both. No one possessed of the smallest experience of the human mind, will deny that it is utterly impossible to inculcate and fix good habits by a process which is continually distasteful to the patient. With regard to labour, which is compulsory and unproductive, the labourer, so far from becoming habituated to it, loathes it the more the longer he is obliged to continue it. Such labour, moreover, has no good effect upon the mind; it produces nothing but disgust and discontent. A similar result is produced upon the body under similar circumstances. Exercise is only beneficial when taken with a good will, and enjoyed with a zest: a man who should walk but two or three miles, grumbling all the way, would be as tired at the end as though he had walked twenty in a more contented mood. What, then, will some one say, are prisoners not to be punished at all? Is every thing to be made easy to them, and ingenuity taxed for devices to render their sentences agreeable, and to take the sting from imprisonment? The answer is ready. The law is not vindictive, and does not pretend to inflict suffering beyond what is necessary for the security of society. The thief and the homicide cannot be allowed to go at large. They must either be sent out of the country, or shut up within it. By some means or other, they must be deprived of the power of inflicting further injury upon their fellow-creatures. But how long are they to be cut off from the world? For a time fixed and irrevocable, and irrespective of subsequent good conduct, or reformation of character, or any other consideration than only the magnitude of the original offence? Surely neither reason nor humanity can approve such a doctrine; for does it not, in fact, involve the very principle which our law repudiates, namely, the principle that its punishments are vindictive? If a man who steals a horse, and is condemned to three years' imprisonment, be compelled to undergo the whole sentence, without reference to his conduct under confinement, this surely is vengeance, and not, what it assumes to be, a punishment proportioned to the necessity of the case. It is, no doubt, proper that a criminal should be condemned to suffer some loss of liberty, more or less, according to the nature of his delinquency, and a minimum should always be fixed; but it seems equally proper, and consistent with acknowledged principles, that a power should reside somewhere of diminishing the maximum, and where more advantageously than in