“What wonder, indeed! Whatever laws you may invent, whatever religions you may propagate, human instinct always was, is, and will be, more reliable than them all. Instinct pointed out to that crowd that a mistake had been made. No one knew where the mistake lay, but its disturbing presence made itself clearly felt. “It is the same instinct that sometimes makes people act, in spite of themselves, apparently against their convictions. I remember once being taken to see a new prison, built according to the very latest ideas and principles. The criminals had not yet been transferred into their new quarters. The founder led me with pride through the enormous, lofty, light, excellently ventilated wards, showed me the perfect sanitary arrangements, the wash-stands, the hygienic beds, the luxurious baths, and the kitchen with all the latest and most modern improvements. The government had evidently built, for criminals, this magnificent sanatorium as a reward for the crimes they had committed. Leaving our honest little peasant to starve and freeze as he will, the powers that be had used the money extorted from him in taxes to provide robbers and thieves and murderers with comfortable free lodgings, including light, warmth, excellent food and clothing! In answer to my perplexed question, the prison inspector explained to me that the prisoner is punished by being deprived of his liberty. What an explanation! Liberty is dear to people who know how to profit by it. Of what use is it to those miserable wretches who look upon vodka and cheap tobacco as life’s greatest treasures? They can get both in prison, to say nothing of the gayest and most congenial society! Such prisons are a mockery of justice, and a perversion of common sense. All this and much more could be said to the Government—but the fault-finder would be wrong. The whole kernel of the matter lies in the fact that though we still refuse to accept the new teaching, though we regard it with contempt and hold it up to derision, we nevertheless instinctively already build, not prisons, but—_sanatoria_. As usual, instinct is more far-seeing than reason or the law. The time is not far off when prison inspectors (who have been transferred by chance into these new sanatoria, together with all the remaining out-of-date paraphernalia of the old institutions) will be replaced by doctors. Then, and only then, will begin the real recovery and redemption of society, never to be attained by the naïve isolation of acute cases of disease, or the destruction of sick people as if they were mad dogs.” “But how can such cures be possible? These are surely mere dreams!”