The writings of De Tocqueville and Beaumont, the delegates sent out by France to study the cellular plan in America, had a wide influence in restraining that excessive zeal for aiming at the moral or religious reform of prisoners, which had inspired the Quakers of Pennsylvania in their crusade against the abuses of the old system. The words of De Tocqueville are worth quoting, as they called back the minds of men at a time when such a warning was greatly needed, to a just and wise appreciation of the function and purpose of punishment, and corrected a tendency which is always asserting itself, to exaggerate the necessity for moral and spiritual reform, at the expense of the other essential attributes of punishment. He says, "I say it boldly: if the penitentiary system has no other purpose than reform, the lawgiver must abandon the system, not because it is not admirable, but because it is too rarely attained. The moral reform of the individual is a great thing for the religious man, but not for the statesman: a political institution does not exist for the individual, but for the mass. Moral reform is then only an accident of the system. Its value is in the habit of order, work, separation, education, obedience to inflexible rule. These have a profound moral value. If a man is not made honest, he contracts honest habits: he was a useless person, he now knows how to work: if he is not more virtuous, he is at least more reasonable: he has the morality of self-interest, if not of honour." MM. De Tocqueville and Beaumont had been commissioned by the French Government in 1831 to visit the United States, and to report on the comparative advantages of the Auburn and Pennsylvania systems. They were followed in 1837 by M. Demetz, the famous founder of the Colony of Mettray. It was due to the influence of these men, aided by the writings of MM. Lucas and Bérenger in France, and of Ducpetiaux in Belgium, that a remarkable impulse was given in Western Europe to the adoption of the cellular system. Two International Congresses were held at Frankfort in 1846, which declared in favour of the separate system. It was to this period of keen interest in the question of prison reform that in England we owe the model prison at Pentonville, 1842, the Prison of Louvain in Belgium, and a large number of cellular prisons built in France, Switzerland, Prussia, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. We have here the beginning of the later International movement, which afterwards found expression in the International Prison Commission-a formal body of experts nominated by most of the leading States of the World, whose periodical meetings in different centres since the London Congress of 1872 are recognized as a great civilizing influence in all that relates to the treatment of prisoners, the construction of Prisons, and the revision of penal law.