Under enlightened management, commitment to such reformatories might be made for an indefinite period, with the same limited discretion that the law now gives to courts of justice, to be dependent largely upon the behavior of the criminal, and to be determined not before, but after his term of imprisonment began. The superintendent and board of managers should, in that case, be clothed with large discretionary powers to dismiss, to detain, to place in higher or lower classes, as their best judgments should dictate, and as the actual and tried needs and progress of reform in each individual case might demand. The vast, costly, and architecturally imposing structures which are now denominated "reformatories," and which in many cases might be much more appropriately labelled "failures," if not discarded altogether, could be supplemented by simple and inexpensive structures, giving abundant room and light and air. With such conditions and surroundings, and under such a system intelligently administered, it is reasonable to believe that no small proportion of first offenders, who, under our present method, drift into the hopelessly, and it might in many cases be added, helplessly, criminal classes, would be restored to moral soundness and self-respecting citizenship. But with the most efficient system of reformation which human wisdom could devise, there would still be a large contingent of incorrigible offenders, who, from hereditary taint, bad environment, or other causes, have cut themselves off from all retreat, burned the bridges behind them, and enlisted in a life warfare against human society and law. Most second offenders and those whose brutal past points to an irredeemable future should properly be classed as life criminals, and with these, society, while not forgetting "the quality of mercy," should deal with firm hand and inexorable justice. As our government is not so situated that penal colonies are practicable, walled villages might be built with all the safeguards which modern science and inventive skill can supply for the absolute and permanent isolation of these "life criminals." In these penal villages, various grades and classes should be placed each by itself. Behind these never-opening gates, and under conditions that should relieve the world at once and forever of their presence, these avowed and unrepentant enemies of social and civil order should be compelled to "work out their own salvation."