But there were certain influences that had been silently operating for some time before this, and leading men's minds to a juster and truer conception of the purpose of punishment. Those influences were both ecclesiastical and secular. The influence of the Church in the middle ages has profoundly affected the modern idea of punishment. '_Le système pénitentiaire_' is the direct heir of the '_pénitences_' of the Church. In days when no distinction had yet been created between crime and sin, these were the expiation of both. The public '_pénitence_' effected both repentance and example, as a warning to others. The private '_pénitence_' worked by 'solitude,' to the moral value of which the early Church attached very great value--"_Quoties inter homines fui, minus homo redii_" was the guiding maxim which separated the monk from his fellow-man. 'Solitary confinement,' as we understand the phrase, dates from the old '_Detrusio in Monasterium_' of Canonical law. But while religious custom had rendered familiar the idea of deprivation of liberty as a means of effecting both repentance and expiation, the influence of the French philosophers and encyclopædists of the eighteenth century had destroyed the claims of the State to deprive a person of liberty by arbitrary process for indefinite periods, or for any period beyond that warranted by the strict necessity of the case. The famous treatise of Beccaria in the middle of the same century further determined the reaction against all arbitrary, unjust, and cruel penalties. He was the first of the utilitarians; every punishment which did not arise from actual necessity of social defence, was, to him and his school, tyrannical and superfluous. Its object was not to torment or afflict a sensitive human being beyond the strict limit of social utility. His propositions have become commonplaces now; but they were new in the age when they were written, and probably no work has exercised a greater influence in the domain of penal law. It is true that, irrespective of the influence of the Church, and of the writings of philosophers, isolated experiments in the way of prison reform had been made in different parts of Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some of these anticipated in a remarkable way the principles in vogue to-day. The Protestants of Amsterdam in 1593 built a prison for women, which had for its object their moral reform by work and religious influences. There are records of similar establishments in Germany and Hanseatic towns. In 1703, Clement XI. built the famous Prison, St. Michel, for young prisoners, and, later in the century, Villain XIV. built the celebrated cellular prison at Gand, which excited the admiration of our own Howard.