association with criminal life at large shut out!” And yet we are dissatisfied! This comfortable, easy-going routine of the modern prison is viewed with scarcely more approval by the thoughtful investigator of to-day than the horrors of the primitive prison. It is deeply interesting and suggestive to take note of the opinions expressed during recent years by those most intimately acquainted with the modern prison. “Why are our prisons failures?” asks Mr. Horsley, who is as impressed as much as any one by the material progress of prisons. “Men are asking, and will more loudly ask, ‘Why are our prisons such utter failures?’ In the face of the phenomena of recidivism, and men and women with hundreds of convictions, it is absurd to imagine that they are as deterrent as they should be.” The prisoner is, he points out, but temporarily suspended from habits of crime by circumstances not under his own control: “He may even boast of his intentions, but out he must go, with as much safety to the State as if all mad dogs were muzzled for twenty-four hours and then all unmuzzled, because it had been found that in that period a certain proportion ceased to be dangerous; or as if all small-pox patients were discharged from hospital so many weeks after reception, whether cured or not.”[94] Another prison chaplain (Rev. C. Goldney), speaking from an experience of twelve years, writes still more recently:--“I say, unhesitatingly, that if a society for the manufacture of criminals were set on foot, that society could in no better way further its aims than by pressing for the imprisonment of every little boy and girl who could, on any decent pretext, be brought before a bench of magistrates. Prison officials well know the hardening influence of gaol life on the young, and statistics show how unlikely it is that the first term of imprisonment will be the last in the case of children of tender years. They learn the secret which should jealously be kept from them--that a short imprisonment is after all no such very terrible punishment.” Mr. Michael Davitt has learnt by actual experience the realities of English convict life at Dartmoor, Portsmouth, and Portland, and the valuable book in which he has summed up those experiences is full of wise and fruitful suggestions. After pointing out that philanthropic intentions on the part of the heads of a department are no guarantee for their administration at the hands of warders and assistant-warders, he continues[95]:--“Penal servitude has become so elaborated that it is now a huge punishing machine, destitute, through centralised control and responsibility, of discrimination, feeling, or sensitiveness; and its non-success as a deterrent from crime, and complete failure in reformative effect upon criminal character, are owing to its obvious essential tendency to deal with erring human beings--who are still men despite their crimes--in a manner which mechanically reduces them to a uniform level of disciplined brutes.