did nothing but unmixed harm, though he was sure that throughout the country the greatest pains had been taken to make our prisons as useful as possible in the way of being reformatories. But, as a matter of fact, they were not so.” M. Laloue, inspector-general of prisons in France, stated before a commission that “with our existing system, twenty-four hours’ imprisonment suffices, under certain circumstances, to ruin a man.” The following conversation ensued. _M. Tailhand_: “There is perhaps some exaggeration in the statement that twenty-four hours’ imprisonment can ruin a man.” _M. Laloue_: “I do not exaggerate. I say what I have seen. The prisoner meets a corrupt recidivist; they appoint a _rendez-vous_ outside, and that man is lost.” _M. Tailhand_: “He must be a man of very weak character.” _M. d’Havssonville_: “It is such characters that succumb.” Professor Prins, inspector-general of Belgian prisons, and the chief authority in Belgium on these questions, writes:--“What is the advantage, unless the necessity is absolute, of putting into prison the head of a family to devote him to infamy, to compromise him in the eyes of his fellow-workmen, of his wife, and of his children? Is it not to condemn these latter to abandonment, misery, and mendicity? Is it not to join to the wretchedness which is the act of destiny, a wretchedness which is the act of law? Is it not, in short, to degrade and ruin the delinquent, thus to deliver him over to the suggestions of despair, and to risk making him a recidivist?”[100] Garofalo, the eminent Neapolitan lawyer, certainly one of the most sagacious of those who have in recent years studied the treatment of the criminal, writes:--“Suppose that in some legendary country an austere king forbade all flirtation with married ladies, and that the punishment threatened to the guilty one should be a prohibition to leave during several weeks a certain club, a magnificent hotel, with gardens and terraces, where this gentleman would find his best friends, his old comrades at board and game, who, far from blaming him, would be glad to do the same. In this sympathetic environment we may be sure they would treat with much contempt the absurd law and the punishment it inflicted. Who would not laugh to think that it should be pretended that after such a punishment this individual would not recommence his ordinary life and commit again the very offences for which he has been punished?”[101]