Individual efforts here and there were not wanting to alleviate the sufferings of prisoners, and many a bright page of the martyrology grows brighter still with a recital of the noble sacrifices made by the saints of the church to ameliorate the condition of captives. St. Vincent de Paul, a voluntary inmate of the _bagnes_ of Paris, teaching and encouraging his fellow-prisoners, was the prototype of Goldsmith’s kind-hearted Dr. Primrose, with the exception that the saint outdid in reality what the poet’s fancy merely pictured. Other saints, when prevented from offering relief at home, sold themselves into foreign servitude; and we read of their noble efforts to render at least endurable the acute sufferings of captives in Barbary, Tripoli, and Tunis. But these spasmodic and unsystematic endeavors to better the condition of criminals were attended with no lasting good, and not till the serious labors of the noble Howard invited attention to the importance of the matter was public attention fully awakened. His visits to the prisons of the Continent of Europe, and his frequent appeals to the governments to introduce much-needed reforms and to redress palpable wrongs, enlisted the active sympathies of the wise and good. Then for the first time the doctrine which Montesquieu and Beccaria had so often admirably set forth in their writings was adopted in practice, and legislators and governments assumed as the basis of prison reform the principle that all punishment out of proportion to the crime is a wrong inflicted on the criminal. Advances at first were exceedingly slow, but the true impetus to prison reform was given and a new and higher social lode was struck. While John Howard was yet engaged in the effort to solve the problem he had set before himself, a new science was springing into existence which was to lend to his labors the full promise of success. The value of statistics was but little understood and appreciated till the latter portion of the last century, and so imperfect in this respect had been the records of town, provincial, and national communities that history has keenly felt the loss of this important adjunct to her labors, and has been compelled to grope in darkness because the light of statistical information could not be had. Since this century set in, however, statistics have risen to the dignity of a science, and the truly valuable information they afford, the floods of light they have shed on all social matters, the service they have lent to medical science, to hygiene, to sanitary reforms, and above all to the prevalence of crime with its grades and surroundings, fully attest the sufficiency of its title.