The question of Prison Reform is all the more important because it is only by the agency of the Gaol that Society attempts to deal with its hopeless cases. If a woman, driven mad with shame, flings herself into the river, and is fished out alive, we clap her into Prison on a charge of attempted suicide. If a man, despairing of work and gaunt with hunger, helps himself to food, it is to the same reformatory agency that he is forthwith subjected. The rough and ready surgery with which we deal with our social patients recalls the simple method of the early physicians. The tradition still lingers among old people of doctors who prescribed bleeding for every ailment, and of keepers of asylums whose one idea of ministering to a mind diseased was to put the body into a strait waistcoat. Modern science laughs to scorn these simple "remedies" of an unscientific age, and declares that they were, in most cases, the most efficacious means of aggravating the disease they professed to cure. But in social maladies we are still in the age of the blood-letter and the strait waistcoat. The Gaol is our specific for Despair. When all else fails Society will always undertake to feed, clothe, warm, and house a man, if only he will commit a crime. It will do it also in such a fashion as to render it no temporary help, but a permanent necessity. Society says to the individual: "To qualify for free board and lodging you must commit a crime. But if you do you must pay the price. You must allow me to ruin your character, and doom you for the rest of your life to destitution, modified by the occasional successes of criminality. You shall become the Child of the State, on condition that we doom you to a temporal perdition, out of which you will never be permitted to escape, and in which you will always be a charge upon our resources and a constant source of anxiety and inconvenience to the authorities. I will feed you, certainly, but in return you must permit me to damn you." That surely ought not to be the last word of Civilised Society.