If specialists are required anywhere, they are required in our prison officialdom. Not cranks or doctrinaires, not men who have made up their minds that they know all there is to be known about criminals and human nature, not fussy and ‘goody-goody’ people, and certainly not official martinets, should be in control of our prisons. Order and discipline there must, of course, be, but there is a discipline that kills as well as one that makes alive. There is small use in trying to discipline men by killing their better parts and destroying their useful faculties. Great-hearted, wise-headed men, men of tact but men of sympathy, men who have above all things a knowledge of human nature, should have control of our prisoners. The medical profession must play a more important part, and the chaplains must be embodiments of a living Christ, and full of a Divine pity even for the very worst. ‘The greater sinner a man is, the greater the need of his reform; the lower a man has fallen, the greater his need to rise; the more hopeless a man seems, the greater his claim for pity.’ So writes a criminal to me, and on these grounds he implores me to help him when his sentence has expired. I think Christ would have said the same. ‘I, whose vast pity almost makes me die,’ Tennyson makes King Arthur say; and such a vast pity should permeate the heart--nay, the very bones and marrow of every prison chaplain. ‘Power itself hath not half the might of gentleness’ has been well said; and of all qualities of the human heart and mind, the power of sympathy is the mightiest, for it disarms resistance and overcomes evil with good. Once let our prisoners know that the officials are animated with a desire for their welfare, and all things will be possible; but they must feel it. The best qualified officials will, however, be comparatively helpless without a proper system; true, they can make the best of a bad system, but with a good system their work would be powerful for good. They too, themselves, would profit, for it would interest them, and call into activity their better qualities, many of which must lie dormant under the present condition of affairs. We want a system that will help to humanize the prisoner, not to brutalize him. It will, I know, pass the wit of man to devise any plan by which the whole of our prisoners can be ‘cured’; it is impossible to invent any system that will be suitable for every prisoner, for they are varied as nature itself. But it is practicable, and it would be wise, to have a system that, while punishing the prisoner, shall not by its punishments defeat the object it has in view. The ‘terrors of the law’ have little effect upon brutalized men, for they feel themselves at war with society, and, by the treatment meted out to them in prison, society has declared itself at war with them. Consequently they come out of prison more hardened than when they entered it, and a repetition of crime is most likely to result.