The punishments which we should like to see abolished, if others without equal or greater disadvantages could be discovered, are the crank and shot-drill. 'What is the crank?' may be asked by happy people who have never had to do with prisons in any way. It is, we answer, a Sisyphus' wheel that the prisoner is forced to turn twelve or fourteen thousand times each day, for no other reason than because the useless monotonous exercise is sufficiently hateful to him to be a real punishment. 'To what purpose is this waste?' we may ask. Why is this wheel not made to pump water or grind corn or do some other useful work? Why should a man be degraded into a machine, and made to turn a wheel merely for the sake of turning it? Will he not in this way lose all self-respect? Yes; these are the unanswerable arguments against the crank. But then its very uselessness is urged as an argument for its retention. Suppose, for instance, that prisoners are employed in gardens where vegetables are cultivated for barrack-use, what will be the consequence? That soldiers will desire to abandon their own profession for Adam's calling, and for this purpose will designedly get into prison. If, again, the crank-wheel be utilised in any way, men will feel that they are useful members of society, and will probably prefer their new work to the dull routine and irksome duties of barrack-life. Almost the same remarks are applicable to shot-drill, or the very humiliating process of lifting six times each minute for three hours per diem a thirty-six pound cannon-ball, for no other reason than to put it down again three paces from where it originally lay. Nothing can be more fatiguing and worrying than this process of putting the shot there and back, there and back, there and back! But then we must again remark, that to make prisons very comfortable is absolutely to make them useless. Almost all the inmates of military prisons are sentenced for such crimes as these: Desertion--the commonest crime of all--making away with kit, breaking out of barracks, insubordination. How is desertion to be stopped? This is now a very difficult problem with the authorities, and almost all officers give it as their opinion that the plague of desertion can only be stayed by again having recourse to the system lately abolished of branding the letter D on the deserter's side. In the absence of this _Nota bene_, there is nothing to prevent a soldier from enlisting over and over again in different corps, in order to get a bounty and new kit on each occasion.