“That remunerative prison labour is an efficient instrument of punishment and reformation by occupying the whole available time of criminals in uncongenial and compulsory employments; by teaching them the means of gaining an honest livelihood on release; by the inculcation of habits of order and industry, to the displacement of the irregularity and idleness which are the sources of so much vice and crime; and by repaying to the State the whole or part of the cost of repression of crime by the compulsory industry of the unproductive classes, and thus relieving the community at large from a burden which it is at present compelled to bear. “That the economic objections to the remunerative employment of convicts are unsound and untenable; and that even if they were true as respects individuals and small sections of the community, the interests of the minority should yield to the general welfare.” Once more, under the title _Prison Discipline and its Results in Bengal_, first published in the _Journal of the {190} Society of Arts_ in 1872, Dr. Mouat, after describing an exhibition of gaol-manufactures held in Calcutta in 1856, urges “that every prisoner sentenced to labour should be made to repay to the State the whole cost of his punishment in gaol; . . . and that prisons should be made, as much as possible, schools of industry, as combining, more completely than can be effected by any other system, the punishment of the offender, with the protection of society.” He then goes on to show what have been the results of the self-supporting system:― “The net profits realized from the labour of the convicts actually employed in handicrafts, after deducting the cost of production, were, in round numbers, as follows:― £ 1855–56 11,019 ’56–57 12,300 ’57–58 10,841 ’59–60 14,065 ’60–61 23,124 ’61–62 54,542 ’62–63 30,604 ’63–64 54,542 ’64–65 32,988 ’65–66 35,543 ’66 14,287 ’67 41,168 ’68 56,817 ’69 46,588 ’70 45,274 In all, nearly half a million of money. In 1866, the accounts were made up for only eight months, to introduce the calendar in place of the official year, which ended on the 30th of April. “If the limits of time and space permitted, I could show you in minute detail that each skilled prisoner employed in handicrafts, striking the average of all the jails, earned considerably more than he cost; that five of the prisons under my charge were at various times self-supporting, and that one of them, the great industrial prison at Alipore, a suburb of Calcutta, has repaid very considerably more than its cost, for the last ten years continuously.”