We are supposed to have travelled far from the mediæval brutality of prison life, but have the changes not been superficial rather than deep? Setting aside the catalogue of minor regulations and regarding the broad spirit of prison life, one cannot but recognize that the conditions still prevailing have much in common with the past. If we look for the really essential changes during a hundred years, we find just these: (1) a surface cleanliness of apparent perfection; (2) conversation, prison visits, and arrangements tending towards a decent sociability between prisoners and prisoners and between prisoners and the public reduced and rendered difficult by multitudinous bye-laws. On the one hand, a cleanliness obtainable only by irritating industry disproportionate to its proper value; on the other hand, a reduction of such facilities as are most likely to prevent a prisoner from degenerating to a social alien, an automatic machine, or a lunatic. The after-effects of a long sojourn in prison are not readily realizable: it would require a very lively imagination to picture the life and its inherent possibilities. The fact that some prisoners do manage to get through their existence without falling into despair may be taken rather as a tribute to the chances of exception confounding rule than as a proof of conversion to virtue through punishment. It is too much to expect that an ordinary man that has been incarcerated for a period of seven, or five, or even three years, can become, on his liberation, once more a "respectable" member of society. His spirit has been cowed; his self-respect has been annihilated; he has been disqualified for reabsorption in the community; he has been prepared to gravitate once more towards crime and prison. Another unfortunate aspect is the position of the prison warder. Apart from the care of those under him, he is subject to so much personal discipline--is so much the slave of "Rules"--that his life often becomes little superior to that of his charges. In point of social origin or of intellectual attainments he is not inferior to the ordinary policeman; but, while the policeman is taught by society, the warder spends most of his time in an atmosphere of degradation, fatal both to character and to intellect. We are pretty well agreed that consideration and sympathy should be extended to the first offender, except in case of sheer brutality--and, as Dr. Devon points out, even a man that commits an act of brutality is not necessarily a brute--for the first offender is usually the victim of "accidental misconduct." In the case of the habitual offender, who returns to prison time after time for various transgressions, it would seem judicious to keep him permanently from actual freedom, but to treat him more as a diseased and positively dangerous man than as a noxious animal. At any rate, first offenders should not be herded together with case-hardened criminals.