[108] See Dr. Wey’s _Physical and Industrial Training of Criminals_, a valuable little work, in which all the details of this and similar experiences are given with care and fulness. [109] Sufficient attention does not appear to have been given to music in prisons. It is a civilising influence to which the criminal is often very sensitive. An able administrator at the convict prison at Toulon long since recognised this with happy results. [110] For some further information concerning Elmira, see Appendix E. [111] It is perhaps worth noting that the highly intelligent and eclectic administration of Japan have adopted a very similar system, described in an interesting letter by Mr. H. Norman, the travelling commissioner of the _Pall Mall Gazette_, under the title of “An Ideal Prison” (_Pall Mall Gazette_, 18th October 1888):--“Two days previously I had visited the house of the most famous maker in Japan of the exquisite _cloisonné_ ware--the enamel in inlaid metal work upon copper--who rivals in everlasting materials the brush of Turner with his pigments and the pencil of Alma Tadema with his strips of metal. And I had stood for an hour behind him and his pupils, marvelling that the human eye could become so accurate and the human hand so steady and the human heart so patient. Yet I give my word that here in the prison at Ishikawa sat not six but sixty men, common thieves and burglars and peacebreakers, who knew no more about _cloisonné_ before they were sentenced than a Hindoo knows about skates, doing just the same thing--cutting by eye-measurement only the tiny strips of copper to make the outline of a bird’s beak or the shading of his wing or the articulations of his toe, sticking these upon the rounded surface of the copper vase, filling up the interstices with pigment, coat upon coat, and firing and filing and polishing it until the finished work was so true and so delicate and so beautiful that nothing except an occasional greater dignity and breadth of design marked the art of the freeman from that of the convict. _C’etait à ne pas y croire_--one simply stood and refused to believe one’s eyes. Fancy the attempt to teach such a thing at Pentonville or Dartmoor or Sing-Sing! When our criminal reaches his prison home in Tōkyō he is taught to do that at which the limit of his natural faculties is reached. If he can make _cloisonné_, well and good; if not, perhaps he can carve wood or make pottery; if not these, then he can make fans or umbrellas or basket work; if he is not up to any of these, then he can make paper or set type or cast brass or do carpentering; if the limit is still too high for him, down he goes to the rice-mill, and see-saws all day long upon a balanced beam, first raising the stone-weighted end and then letting it down with a great flop into a mortar of rice. But if he cannot even accomplish this poor task regularly, he is given a hammer and left to break stones under a shed with the twenty-nine other men out of