Herbert Spencer says with truth, "that experience and experiments have shown all over the world that the most successful criminal discipline is a discipline of decreased restraints and increased self dependence"; and to a degree of this "self dependence" the convict we refer to had been encouraged to aspire. Of course, in all criminal prisons we must expect a certain percentage of incorrigible characters, who under the best training cannot be brought under control; but the bulk of those in the old Singapore jail, and we had often as many as two thousand at a time, were well behaved, and gave evidence of the good influence of a course of discipline upon them; for when they were advanced to a ticket-of-leave, and thrown again on their own resources, they very rarely a second time came under the cognisance of the police, but peaceably merged into the population, and earned their livelihood by honest means. We have one word to say in reference to the employment of these convicts as warders over their fellow-prisoners; a system, so far as we are aware, then unattempted either in Europe or America, even in a modified form. We do not, however, see why, in the case of well-behaved and suitable European convicts sentenced to long periods of penal servitude, some might not be placed in certain such positions of trust under free warders; and as the new prison rules for our jails may possibly involve a large increase in the warder staff, it has occurred to us that the system might have a trial to a limited extent; but we are, of course, not in a position to speak with any authority upon the subject as affecting our own prisons. In our case, with the exception of two or three European warders, the whole warder staff were convicts; and at first, certainly, there was the fear that so large a number of convict warders might side with the convicts, when a rule they might have thought repugnant to all, was introduced by the governing body. There also appeared the danger that discipline might be undermined by a system of favouritism, especially amongst men of the same caste, or that they would shut their eyes to breaches of the rules. None of these apprehensions were, however, experienced; but, on the contrary, these convict warders were always the first to apprise the authorities of any contemplated attempt at escape, or of any ill-feeling that might be brewing amongst any particular class, or breach of prison rules; so that, in a great measure, they acted in the double capacity of both detectives and police. It was only upon very rare occasions that a convict warder had to be disrated; and the punishment amongst them consisted for the most part in fines for want of vigilance and attention to detail, and such like petty offences. They all manifested the highest appreciation of the trust reposed in them, and lived in a perpetual fear that they might forfeit their position, and have to begin anew the whole course of jail punishment.