"At least," said Hippocrates, "Father of Medicine," to his students, "be sure that you do no harm." So much should be demanded of Pharisaic punters with a penchant for scurrilous scribbling. X PRISON DISCIPLINE Not one in ten thousand digs to the deep meaning of the word "discipline." Particularly as to prison application, discipline is in the minds of the great majority as measures objectively imposed to compel subjective adjustment to house rules and regulations laid down. Such contracted view covers only so much of primary compulsion as may be necessary to imbue refractory criminals with at least fearsome respect for correctional measures. Thereafter, the aim should be to enlist the prisoner's voluntary efforts for skill and culture under his own control. Few prisoners challenge the mailed fist of the State. Save for some of those confined in prisons of last resort, the bulk of prisoners buckle to, from one or another motive, and make the best of a bad job to an early parole. They do not mean to take their cue from the seething fraction that always constitutes the nucleus of real criminals in America. As a rule, the latter have first off to be force-fed to a degree in order to bring home to them the potency of the State's power. If discipline visited upon such men is to carry for their amendment and repair, it must take heed of natural and acquired predispositions to think and act obliquely. True, there come times when the persistently refractory course of the unit leaves him beyond the pale of disciplinary choice. Where, in the face of every good influence and helping hand, a prisoner goes about it advisedly to stir up group manifestations against reformative processes, there is nothing for it but to meet him with power beyond his own. Moreover, when he insists upon contact of extremes, no apology should be offered in the process of forcing him to respect for that power. And moreover, it is tentatively insignificant if the "respect" is engendered solely by fear of the consequence. As an individual he persistently crosses the common good. As an individual he must be met, until he is brought to understand that hyenaized conduct, causeless except for his ego-centric curves, entitles him temporarily to no more consideration than is accorded the self-determining social pariah. This, because his interests as compared with the interests of the mass, are for the time being as naught. The cardinal mistake in the matter of handling instinctive anti-social plungers, consists in not taking up disciplinary stitches with them in time, as for instance: every reformatory in the land confines an appreciable percentage of "graduates" of juvenile schools, in which, as "cute" kids, they were indulged day in and out in the execution of self-centered acts.