Although all cruel and inhuman methods of punishment are forbidden in nearly all of our prisons, and the punishment for crimes that is meted out to criminals was never so free from malice and revenge as it is to-day, yet we are free to say that as far as prison reform is concerned, we have not yet reached the ideal. Capital punishment as it is practised at the present time is in our opinion simply a relic of barbarous times. No one on this planet is authorized to take away life. God gave it, and He is the only One that can take it away. And no matter what kind of punishment may be meted out to the homicide, the worst and most foolish thing that can be done to him is to put him to death. It matters little what a man’s crime is, if he is to be reformed, he should have a future hope held out to him, and he should realize it, provided he can show by his life that he is worthy of it. While it is true civilization has been in the forward march the past three hundred years, crime has been slowly and perceptibly on the increase; that is to say, crime has been growing faster than the population. The fact that so many jails and reformatories are being erected in all the States and Territories is evidence enough to substantiate that statement. Statistics show that the growth of population in this country has maintained a steady increase since 1850, with an average perhaps of about thirty per cent. each decade, while the criminal increase during these same periods will average eighty per cent., or nearly three times as large as the increase in population. In former years the methods in vogue for reforming men and women behind the bars were the stocks, the dark cell or dungeon, the whipping-post and the tread-mill, nearly all of which have been abolished during the past century, and more humane methods have been used, we are glad to say, which is a cause for rejoicing among Christian people everywhere. Perhaps one of the greatest needs of the prisons of this country is their complete divorce from politics and their reorganization on business principles of merit and capability. While it is true that the civil service law, which operates in nearly every State, has raised the standard of merit among the prison officiary, notwithstanding inferior men, entirely unfitted for such work, creep into these institutions as a reward for political services. But it is also true that the prisons of the twentieth century are as far advanced from those of the middle ages as those of the middle ages are ahead of the prisons that existed at the beginning of the Christian era. In those days jails were little better than hog pens, perhaps much like the old cistern into which they thrust Jeremiah the prophet, when they let him down with cords, and where his feet sank in the mire. Such prisons were places of pestilential horror, cold and damp, from which the sunlight was entirely excluded, and where the chains often rusted on the hands and feet of the prisoners.