As to the future, there seems to me to be three directions in which those who are pressing for prison reform might usefully proceed:-- 1. The organization of Probation on large and well-considered national lines. 2. The application of some of the principles of Preventive Detention to our Penal Servitude system. 3. The co-ordination, with a view to the prevention of crime, of all organized effort, collective and individual, now existing in this country, and of which most of the value is wasted from the absence of unity of aim, and of mutual co-operation. 1. Though Probation is ancillary to the Prison System, and is closely allied to the actual administration of justice in the Courts of law, its method and working must be of profound interest and importance to all who desire to find alternatives, consistent with the due assertion of the law, to commitment to prison. This, as is so often said, should be the last and not the first resort. Custom, routine, and the fatal ease, and saving of trouble to all concerned, has, in the past, induced the tendency to regard the warrant of commitment to prison as the ordinary and only expedient for satisfying the claims of Justice. It is only of late years that the successful operation of Probation, or _sursis á l'exécution de la peine_ in foreign countries, and notably in some of the States of America, has awakened a lively and growing interest in this method of finding an alternative to imprisonment; and here we have to steer a wise and prudent course between the Scylla of harsh infliction of a '_peine déshonorante_' which imprisonment for a few days really is, and the Charybdis of undue leniency. This is the function of the Magistrate: on him depends a successful working of the system, and he must have a deciding voice as to its application. Put consistently with the free authority and discretion of the Court, it ought to be possible to create a national system, for which the Lord Chancellor, or Secretary of State, as Chief of the Magistracy, would be responsible. I would not advise the imposition of any official system independently of the Courts, but only that the political heads of the Judiciary should take steps to satisfy themselves that Probation, as a system, is working efficiently at every criminal court in the country, before whom offenders of all ages, liable to the penalty of imprisonment, are brought. It is the function of the Secretary of State to take steps to satisfy himself that the Police Forces of the country are working efficiently, without in any way interfering with the discretion of the local Police Authority in the management of their respective forces. This is done by a system of State-Inspection, and a certificate of efficiency when all is reported well. The same system might be applied to Probation. State control would only be exercised through an Inspector-General at Whitehall, who would be assisted by Chief Probation officers in the various judicial areas. These would