This is where prisons fail, and must continue to fail if the present methods are continued, for in our endeavours to administer equal justice to all classes, we commit the greatest injustice; and in our attempts to be merciful, we are cruel to many of our prisoners. For the feeble-minded, the weaklings, the vagrants and the habituals, prison has no terrors. To them it is at once a sanatorium and a lodging-house, as necessary for their health and personal cleanliness as quarantine is for those smitten of the plague. To them the bath and the change of clothing, the clean cell, and the regular food are comforts, even refinement. But to the casual offender such things may be sickening and maddening beyond endurance. To the former, the semi-idleness of prison, which makes no demand on their physical and mental powers, is grateful and comforting. To the man of industry, brain, imagination and culture this idle monotony is exasperating to a degree, unless he be endowed with philosophical stoicism. The effect of prison discipline, then, is determined not by the rules and routine of any particular prison, but by the temperament of the individual under detention. This failure to reform must not be attributed, then, to prison system altogether, still less must it be attributed to any lack of sympathy in the prison officials; but rather to the two facts, that prisons are unnatural places, and that a prison population is made up of strange and motley individuals, each differing widely from his fellows in temperament and taste, in physical and mental capacity. An educated and refined man, one who loves liberty and social life, must of necessity find prison a terrible place. Should he be of a nervous, imaginative or morbid temperament, he suffers the torments of Hell. He knows in his heart that he has been a fool, probably he is never tired of reminding himself of the fact; but he gets no comfort from his knowledge, it adds no reasonableness to his disposition. He reviews his life again and again, not with feelings of shame or sorrow, but for the purpose of finding some excuse for himself or fixing some blame upon others. He is full of fear for the future, but he has no sorrow for the past; he has no desire to undo the wrong he has done, no particular desire to avoid such wrongs in the future. He lives in a state of chronic irritation; he is morose or excitable by turns. He does not find the officials sympathetic or courteous, for they, too, are human, and even in prison like meets with like. The sufferings of these men are intense. The iron enters into their souls—and though their sufferings are largely self-created, they are none the less real. Ask such a man to give a description of prison life, and he will give one worthy of Charles Reade.