The habitual criminal who has grown accustomed to prison life cares for no other, and is suited for no other. “I have seen men,” said Lauvergne, “almost dying from home-sickness because they must soon leave the prison.” Jules Vallès spoke of _l’air vénérable_ of the old convict; Émile Gautier calls it _l’air reposé_. Prison, he adds, is a kind of nirvana, and he tells of an old convict who possessed in a high degree this _air vénérable_, closely resembling Thiers, who, at the end of five years’ sentence passed at Clairvaux, wrote as follows to the director:--“Sir, you know me. You know who I am, what I am worth, and what services I can render you. Now I am about to be thrown up again into the world, where I shall not know what to do. As soon as I have consumed my allowance in having a good time I shall immediately get myself arrested. May I beg of you to have the extreme kindness, as soon as I am again condemned to several years’ imprisonment, to claim me for Clairvaux? I will inform you as to time and place, and in the meanwhile kindly reserve my place. Neither you nor I will have to repent of this agreement.” That letter, more pathetic than amusing, is the logical outcome of our prison system quite as much as of our social system. The haphazard fashion in which the period of a prisoner’s detention is fixed on beforehand is quite in harmony with the unsatisfactory character of the results obtained. It is well known that the criminal courts are prevented from awarding any sentence between two years, the longest period of imprisonment, and five years, the shortest legal sentence of penal servitude. Yet, as the Directors of Convict Prisons point out, “now that penal servitude is always carried out in prisons at home, there is no fundamental distinction between the two classes of punishment.” On the 31st of March 1888 there were in English convict prisons 6970 persons. Of these, 3034 were undergoing penal servitude for 5 years, the lowest term permitted by law; in the case of one solitary individual the exact period of 6½ years was required, while 1387 needed 7 years of prison treatment. Only 6 persons had been guilty of an iniquity equal to 9 years’ penal, but no fewer than 1022 had committed an offence equivalent to 10 years’ penal servitude, while 1 person only in England, having managed to just surpass this sum of iniquity, was in for 11 years. There were 240 in for 20 years, but only 3 for 21 years, and to 1 individual had been meted out exactly 29 years. It would be interesting to know by what delicate and complicated considerations this precise sum of guiltiness was reached. If we turn to the statistics of the United States at the same period we shall find the same peculiarities, though the variations in the periods doled out to long-term prisoners are spread over a wider field; they begin at 1 year, and include 18 for 50 years, and 82 for 99 years. “The favourite sentence,” as Mr. Wines remarks, “seems to be two years; then five, then