ass of ignorant unskilled labour where competition is
always hottest and most perilous, it will teach him, better than he
could know without it, the relative value of things; it will so elevate
his thoughts and refine his tastes that the path of duty in its roughest
and steepest places, will yet steadily attract his footsteps.

The charge is sometimes made that the criminal is made more dangerous by
education. The assertion begs all it carries. It assumes that education
strengthens character but does not transform character which is false
for it does both.... No man can use his mind in the careful
investigation of moral principles, and become thereby merely a more
dangerous cheat. No man who has opened his eyes to see the revelations
of eternal wisdom and goodness written in letters of light on all the
handiwork of Nature, can be made thereby merely a more dangerous
villain. On the contrary, every hour of honest search after reality, of
careful industry governed by principles and lined to accuracy, every
hour spent in happy contemplation of wisdom and goodness, wherever
manifested will make the man forever the better for it.

=Physical Culture.=--This Department of the Reformatory falls into three
divisions--the Gymnastic, the Military and the Manual.

=The Gymnastic.=--The idea of a gymnasium within a gaol must deliver no
small shock to the prejudices of many, but in studying the Elmira system
we must endeavour to keep before us the end which the authorities are
aiming at, viz., the restoration to society of their criminals in a not
only harmless state but in their most useful state, and this can only be
made possible by the most careful and thorough training of the mind,
body and soul.

Neither is there any cause to think that the prisoners are getting too
good a time, and that, being treated better than the industrious worker,
a premium is being offered to crime. The investigation of the
authorities has revealed no case in which a man has entered the
institution on account of advantages offered. To criminals they are not
realised as advantages. They understand them only as the rough road
leading to their release, and it is about the last thing for men of
shiftless, lazy, inconsequent habits of mind and body, to suppose that
they are having a good time when sent to a gymnasium every morning for
two hours' steady work. Work which brings all the muscles of the body
into play and which demands the fixed attention of t