It is now generally recognised that pain, or anything that lowers vitality, operates injuriously and retards the recovery of patients; and every means is taken to prevent suffering, not because it makes the patient feel bad, but because it causes him to be bad. Suppose a surgeon said to a man who appeared before him with a scalp wound received through falling on the kerb while under the influence of drink, "You have been foolish and wicked, since you have made yourself intoxicated and lost control of your senses. Your head is wounded, and it is only a chance that you have not been killed. You have disgraced yourself in the eyes of those among your friends who have any sense of respectability, and you have run the risk of losing your employment as the result of your intemperance. This I cannot permit to pass unpunished. An example must be made of you in order to deter others from following the same pernicious course. You have forfeited the right to consideration, but, though you must be made to remember that such conduct as yours cannot be lightly passed over, I shall deal with you as leniently as possible for the sake of your wife and family. You will receive an application of germs to your wound which will produce erysipelas, after which I shall proceed to deal with your cure." The doctor who tried this method would be sent to a lunatic asylum; but it is precisely what is done in our courts. The prisoner is told he is bad--and he is; then he is sent--to be made better? Not at all. Whatever may be said against the prisons, it cannot be shown that they ever were designed to reform those sent to them, and if they fail to do so they do not therefore fail in the purpose for which they were built, which is to detain and punish criminals. The extent to which they do punish varies greatly according to the antecedents of the person who is sent to them. On the clerk and the labourer who have received the same sentence its physical effect may differ very much. If both are put to do labouring work, as they very well may be, at the end of the day the man who is accustomed to it will be less hurt and fatigued than the man who has been used to other employment. If the object is to make them all alike uncomfortable the clerk should be set to dig a trench and the labourer to write, and at the end of the day the one would be stained with ink and the hands of the other would be stinging or blistered. As it is the work done by the labourer is child's play to him, but it is toilsome to the man whose occupation is sedentary; to the public it is not of much utility in any case.