I have shown, in tracing the history of imprisonment for short sentences (Local Prisons) in this country, how paramount was the influence of America in the first half of the last century. The echo of the controversy between those who upheld the Auburn and the Philadelphian Systems--the Cellular and Associated plans--respectively, still lingers. In America, the movement which determined the reform of Prisons was essentially religious. It was the old idea of '_Pénitence_' borrowed from the Canonical Law, which there, as in Europe, dominated the minds of men who regarded a sentence of the law as the instrument for bringing back the mind of the offender, by solitude and meditation, to remorse for the sinful act, and amendment for the future. The prison cell, as with the monks of old, was the method of redemption--"_cella continuata dulcessit_." If by its positive effect the cell worked redemption of the soul, its negative result was claimed to be equally efficacious in preventing contamination by means of segregation. Pressed severely to its logical conclusion, cellular seclusion became a refinement of cruelty, while, on the other hand, promiscuity, resulting from unregulated association, was admitted in this, as in other countries, to be the nursery of crime. From that day, the course of Prison Reform has been in the direction of finding a compromise between these two opposite principles; an effort to reconcile the deterrent effect of punishment with the object of so improving the mind and body of a prisoner that he shall leave Prison a better and not a worse man. Because it is a more inspiring and a nobler task to reform a man by punishment, than to use punishment merely as the means of retribution by exacting from him the expiation of his offence by a dull, soulless, and a monotonous servitude, public sentiment, in all its zeal for the rehabilitation of the offender, is apt to overlook the primary and fundamental purpose of punishment, which, say what we will, must remain in its essence retributory and deterrent.