Here, indeed, is a problem worthy of the application of all our knowledge of mind and of matter, of our highest scientific attainments.  But it is the same problem that we have in all our education, be it the training of the mind, the development of the body, or the use of both to good ends.  And it goes without saying that its successful solution, in a reformatory for criminals, depends upon the character of the man who administers the institution.  There must be at the head of it a man of character, of intellectual force, of administrative ability, and all his subordinate officers must be fitted for their special task, exactly as they should be for a hospital, or a military establishment, for a college, or for a school of practical industries.  And when such men are demanded, they will be forthcoming, just as they are in any department in life, when a business is to be developed, a great engineering project to be undertaken, or an army to be organized and disciplined.

The development of our railroad system produced a race of great railroad men.  The protection of society by the removal and reform of the criminal class, when the public determines upon it, will call into the service a class of men fitted for the great work.  We know this is so because already, since the discussion of this question has been current, and has passed into actual experiment, a race of workers and prison superintendents all over the country have come to the front who are entirely capable of administering the reform system under the indeterminate sentence.  It is in this respect, and not in the erection of model prisons, that the great advance in penology has been made in the last twenty years.  Men of scientific attainment are more and more giving their attention to this problem as the most important in our civilization.  And science is ready to take up this problem when the public is tired and ashamed of being any longer harried and bullied and terrorized over by the criminal class.

The note of this reform is discipline, and its success rests upon the law of habit.  We are all creatures of habit, physical and mental.  Habit is formed by repetition of any action.  Many of our physical habits have become automatic.  Without entering into a physiological argument, we know that repetition produces habit, and that, if this is long continued, the habit becomes inveterate.  We know also that there is a habit, physical and moral, of doing right as well as doing wrong.  The criminal has the habit of doing wrong.  We propose to submit him to influences that will change that habit.  We also know that this is not accomplished by suppressing that habit, but by putting a good one in its place.

It is true in this case that nature does not like a vacuum.  The thoughts of men are not changed by leaving them to themselves, they are changed by substituting other thoughts.

The whole theory of the Elmira system is to keep men long enough under a strict discipline to change their habits.  This discipline is administered in three ways.  They are put to school; they are put at work; they are prescribed minute and severe rules of conduct, and in the latter training is included military drill.