In the first place, concerted action has been the slogan for every prison reformer. In all too many instances, however, it has been enforced concerted action, and that is of little or no benefit. In all the thirty-odd years that the women of Sherborn have been working in the shop, in the laundry, on the farm there was probably no spontaneous co-operation whatever. The best that could be said was that they were not sitting idle in their cells. The most important contribution which Sherborn’s chaplain, more or less unconsciously, has brought to that curious community is a new sort of inhibition. Up to this time the correction of the wayward has been through the medium of morals. About the best thing that could be done while a woman was serving her term was to attempt to awaken in her a sense of her own responsibility, of her duty, of the standards by which other people lived and which were necessary for comfort and health and ultimate goodness. It was an attempt to get into working order that moral inhibition that keeps the greater part of us from forging checks when we need money, or murdering our enemies when we hate them. Mrs. Wilkinson has a new inhibition--the æsthetic. Fifty per cent. of the women in Sherborn are there for acts which to the normal person would be unspeakably repulsive. The average woman is held back from filthiness by her æsthetic sense, even if she isn’t by her moral sense. By giving the women who for a year or two come under the State’s care an understanding of any one art, especially of music, which appeals most directly, a standard is given from which the individual never backslides. Moral standards depreciate, but the person who has been educated past ragtime and past bad pictures never really enjoys them again. And while the æsthetic inhibition has less direct bearing on conduct than the moral, while it does not always have force enough to be effective, it is one more chance for the girl who goes out from under the State’s supervision to stay out. This is, of course, one of the greatest problems of the penal institution--how to hold the discharged prisoner to the standards which she has but just grasped during her term. “If we could only keep them here until we had set them squarely on their feet,” said Mrs. Hodder, the head of the prison. “The great difficulty is in dove-tailing life here with the life that they meet outside. People are so merciless, so cruel--they force the girl straight down again into the life she came from.