In regard to the Parole Law, if Mr. Collins is not the author of it in its entirety he certainly suggested most of it, and worked harder for its passage than any man living, and it would have been vastly more comprehensive, if it had not been for some men who objected to it being applied to first offenders charged with more serious offences. If Mr. Collins had done nothing but champion this one law he would have deserved the lasting gratitude of good men everywhere. Before we can rightly understand the advances in prison reform that have taken place the past hundred years, we ought to be familiar with the treatment accorded prisoners in the early centuries of the Christian era and for hundreds of years afterwards. The prisons we read of in the ancient world were places of pestilential horror. They were dark, damp, and unsanitary dungeons, from which the sunlight was entirely excluded, where the chains rusted on the arms and feet of the prisoners, and where they were frequently left to die of starvation. The ancient method of dealing with criminals was threefold, namely, death, exile and physical punishment or torture. Some of these methods prevail in some parts of Europe to the present time. But the Christian ideal of prison management is several steps higher. It has not yet reached it, but it has been forcing itself upon the world for many years. We believe a prison ought to be a place where the offender against human law is to be reformed or Christianized, and afterwards restored to society an industrious and useful man. The prevailing idea in some of our criminal courts is that the average prisoner is not only a dangerous character, but also a hopeless moral and social defective and must be restrained and punished permanently. After the criminal has been sent to a penal institution, the authorities there, as a rule, seem not to care whether he is reformed or not. Indeed, the prisons of to-day, with few exceptions, cannot reform the unfortunates therein, as they are not conducted on Christian principles nor by Christian men. Our legislators have not yet learned that the only positive reclaiming force in the world for criminals is the religion of the Lord Jesus. Not only is this true, but many of the persons who manage our prisons do not believe in religion themselves and certainly have little faith in it for others. There is so much indefiniteness of idea as to what prison reform is, that it would be well at the outset to say what we mean by it. We would define prison reform not only as the reformation of the prisoner, but the more efficient management of our prisons by men of fitness and experience in the interest of humanity and economy.