the plank bed is to produce insomnia. There is no other object in it,
and it invariably succeeds. And even when one is subsequently allowed a
hard mattress, as happens in the course of imprisonment, one still
suffers from insomnia. It is a revolting and ignorant punishment.

"With regard to the needs of the mind, I beg that you will allow me to
say something.

"The present prison system seems almost to have for its aim the wrecking
and the destruction of the mental faculties. The production of insanity
is, if not its object, certainly its result. That is a well-ascertained
fact. Its causes are obvious. Deprived of books, of all human
intercourse, isolated from every humane and humanising influence,
condemned to eternal silence, robbed of all intercourse with the
external world, treated like an unintelligent animal, brutalised below
the level of any of the brute-creation, the wretched man who is confined
in an English prison can hardly escape becoming insane."

This letter ended by saying that if all the reforms suggested were
carried out much would still remain to be done. It would still be
advisable to "humanise the governors of prisons, to civilise the
warders, and to Christianise the Chaplains."

This letter was the last effort of the new Oscar, the Oscar who had
manfully tried to put the prison under his feet and to learn the
significance of sorrow and the lesson of love which Christ brought into
the world.

In the beautiful pages about Jesus which form the greater part of _De
Profundis_, also written in those last hopeful months in Reading Gaol,