14. I became acquainted with some young fellows who had less regard for Sunday than I had been accustomed to; by degrees I went once instead of twice to chapel; then I got fond of theatres, going perhaps once or twice a week; then came public houses, a distaste for religion, novel-reading, Sunday newspapers, and an ardent desire to see what is termed "London life," that is, scenes of profligacy and vice.

15. Disobedience to parents, and then masters; Sabbath breaking and the love of vain company; theatres, concerts, balls, dances, night-walking, card-playing and pleasures of all kinds.

16. Being so fond of the play and the singing-rooms, and the bad company I got acquainted with there.

17. Casting off the fear of God, putting Him and His commandments out of my thoughts, stifling the convictions of conscience, self-dependence, forsaking home, throwing myself in the way of committing sin, by being employed in an unjust system of transacting business for the sake of lucre- these formed the sources of my fall.

18. I was fond of going to the theatre; that was the cause of my troubles.

19. Running away from my master and Sabbath breaking, associating with bad company, and giving myself to lewdness.

20. I disobeyed my Sunday-school teacher's advice, and then I broke the Sabbath day; that was the first cause of all my troubles.

21. Breaking the Sabbath, which is a breach to the rest.

22. There can be, I think, but one answer, however large a number may be asked this question the absence of the fear and love of God.

23. What I think the greatest cause of all my trouble was, frequenting theatres with gay companions, and from that which I humbly beg you will excuse me mentioning, for I am quite ashamed to look back to it, but it has been the chief cause of bringing me to my present condition to houses of ill fame; liquors and dancing and swearing I always did detest, and I humbly trust that them and all my other vices I always shall; mine has truly been a miserable beginning of life, for I am only nineteen years of age; may God grant that it may have a happy ending! O Lord, pardon what I have been, amend what I am, and let thy goodness direct what I shall be!

All this is quite in accordance with our personal knowledge of prisoners. Of the hundreds with whom we have conversed, nearly all, by their own confession, had formed the habit of profane swearing very early in life. Not one had been in the habit of steadily reading the Bible. Not one in ten had attended church regularly since childhood, and nine-tenths had been Sabbath breakers. Less than half claimed to have attended Sunday school in their childhood; and of those who professed to have done so, few could remember the names of their teachers or the books they studied. Scarcely one claimed to be a total abstainer from intoxicating liquors, while the great majority acknowledged themselves intemperate. Nearly sixty per cent owned that they were addicted to licentious practices, nearly an equal proportion that they were tavern haunters, and twenty per cent that they were more or less in the habit of gambling.

What a lurid light do facts like these cast upon the beginnings of crime! In trumpet tones they warn the young of their danger and the old of their duty.

XII. SHALL CONVICTS SHARE IN THEIR EARN

INGS?

BY THE CORRESPONDING SECRETARY.

To this interrogatory our reply is an emphatic yes. We paid a visit to the Massachusetts State prison in the autumn, and were gratified to find that warden Haynes is strongly of the same opinion, as the following passage from his forthcoming annual report attests: Again I am led to inquire if some plan cannot be adopted whereby these men may become interested in the profits of the institution? I am satisfied that if a percentage of the gains could be divided among the inmates, as a reward for industry and good behavior, upon the same principle as time is deducted from their sentences under our commutation law, we should be taking an important step in the right direction. The feeling which, to a certain extent, now exists among them, that the State is making a profit out of their labor, would be dispelled, and each individual would be interested in our prosperity. It would have a tendency to inculcate industry, patience, and perseverance - virtues which would exert an important influence on them when discharged.

In a conversation with Chaplain Carleton, he stated that in visiting the families of prisoners he often encountered harrowing scenes. He thought that, if everybody could see the poverty and destitution which it was his lot not unfrequently to witness, they would be disposed to ask, why should not at least a portion of the earnings of the convicts inure to the benefit of their suffering families? Does it not strike every reflecting mind that this is a most reasonable suggestion? Does it not accord with "the fitness of things that a man, even though he be a convict, earning several dollars a day, should somehow bring those dollars, or a portion of them, into such relation to his family as to keep them from the woes of want and beggary? Take this case, remarked the chaplain, and it is far from being an imaginary one. Here is a man, say thirty years of age, a mechanic, a good workman; but having one serious faultwhich is, that once in three or four months he will get intoxicated, and remain so two or three days. At one of these periodical times of drunkenness he is induced by evil companions, into whose bad company he has fallen by his evil indulgence, to engage in a scheme of robbery, and is caught, tried, convicted, and sent to State prison for three years. He comes here chagrined, vexed, angry with himself, cursing the day he yielded to temptation, and denouncing, in no measured or delicate terms, those through whose instrumentality he fell. Here he is bathed, shaved, housed, clothed, fed, doctored,

nursed, hears preaching, goes to ordinary school and Sunday school, has Bibles, tracts, and religious papers, and access to a library of over eighteen hundred volumes, from which he may take a book three times a week. Now look at his wife and two children. She is a frail and sickly woman; can do but little hard work, and soon finds herself destitute of wood, coal, flour, and other necessaries of life. She sees her children growing up in ignorance and vice, because their garments are worn to rags, and she is ashamed to send them, and they are ashamed to go, to either day school or Sunday school. In this case, who suffers? The guiltless woman and innocent children, or the guilty husband and father? Surely he has darkened their lives and brought sorrow and deprivation upon them. His work is worth three dollars a day; he could get that outside for what he does in the prison. He works (say) three hundred days a yearthat is nine hundred days in the three years. At three dollars a day he earns twenty-seven hundred dollars. Nine hundred of this, a dollar a day, goes to the prison, the rest to the contractor who hires his labor.

Now in the name of all that is fair and honorable, in all equity and justice, should not some of that twenty-seven hundred dollars go toward the support of that poor wife and children? Can any one look at the matter from any standpoint, and answer this question in the negative? On one occasion a prisoner said to the chaplain : "My father was killed in the war, and I hear that my mother is very sick; will you go and see her?" The place was found-a wretched room in a dilapidated house. There was no mother there, however (she had died a few days before), but eight fatherless and motherless children, the eldest not quite twelve years of age, and the youngest only twenty months, with no one to look after them but a poor woman from the neighboring room, who had a family of her own to attend to. These forsaken little creatures were arranged in a row, according to age; and, as they stood thus, their heads rising in regular gradation, they formed a complete human staircase, and a sprightlier or prettier set of children it would be hard to find. Now is it too much to say that the earnings of an older brother, though incarcerated in prison (or, at least, a portion of them), should be devoted to keeping such a group of orphans from starvation or the poor-house?

Many of the men, the chaplain said, are chafing and worrying all through confinement on account of the troubles and privations of their connections through poverty. In speaking about a pardon, something like this is often said: "It is not for myself, sir, I care. I can stand the life here, as I know I deserve punishment. But I

have an aged father, an invalid mother, a sickly, heart-broken wife or motherless children; and it is what they suffer that makes me so anxious to get out that I may help them." Is it not just, as well as humane, that the afflicted families of criminals should derive some support from their earnings?

In nearly if not quite all European prisons, the convicts are allowed a certain portion of their earnings as an encouragement to industry and good conduct. This is the case in Great Britain, Ireland, France, Italy, Netherlands, Germany, etc., etc. In the admirable "House of Correction and Industry" at Moscow, Russia, under Count Sollohub, the prisoners receive at first one-third, and at a later period of their imprisonment two-thirds, of the products of their labor. The consequence is, that there is often a necessity of restraining their eagerness to work, never of urging them to this duty. Every man is taught a complete trade, and the number of relapses is brought down nearly to zero. In France convicts receive from one-third to one-half of their earnings. In 1866 the amount of the product of labor assigned to prisoners was two and a half million francs. The earnings thus allotted to the prisoners are divided into two moieties - one of which, under the name of disposable peculium, serves for the purpose of supplementary provisions, the relief of poor relatives, etc., etc.; the other, under the name of reserved peculium, is intended to be paid on liberation.

Of all the motives that act on man there is none stronger than that of personal interest. The prisoner, borne down and crushed, cannot be raised by any stimulant more powerful than property. We have taken one most important step in prison reform by allowing our convicted and imprisoned criminals to abridge their terms of sentence by industry and obedience. Let us now take another, no less important, and which will certainly prove no less beneficial, by allowing them to share in the product of their toil.

XIII. PRISON STATISTICS: A NATIONAL PRISON

BUREAU.

BY THE CORRESPONDING SECRETARY.

The science of statistics is still in its infancy in the United States; and what is true in general is especially true as regards the statistics of our penal institutions. This department of scientific investigation is too little appreciated, and, as a consequence, too much neglected among us. The laws of social phenomena can be ascertained only by the accumulation and careful analysis and generalization of facts. Returns of such facts, gathered from a wide field of observation and skillfully digested, are indispensable to enable us to judge of the real effect of any system we may have put in operation. What we want to know is the facts; but a knowledge of the facts relating to so complex a subject as that of crime and criminal administration implies a mass of figures, collected from all quarters, and arranged and tabulated with reference to some definite object. The local and the special are to little purpose here; it is the general only that has value- that is, returns so numerous, so manifold and drawn from so wide a field and amid such diversified circumstances as to give significance to the results. It is such returns alone that will yield inferences of practical value. We want to get at an average; and, in order to do this, we must have scope enough and variety enough, both in the range and character of the returns, to be able to eliminate whatever is local and accidental. Only on this condition can our conclusion as to what constitutes the essence of the matter be sound and safe. Only on this condition shall we be able to feel that our inferences rest, not upon mere incidents of the phenomena, which may be partial, casual and immaterial, but on the phenomena themselves apart from variations which are but temporary or adventitious.

We wish to know, for example, whether the stern severity of the old system of prison discipline, or the benign pressure of the new, is the more effective in repressing crime. How are we to determine this question? Obviously our conclusion will have little force unless our facts shall have been collected from a wide territory and under the greatest diversity of conditions and incidents, so that every phase and relation of the phenomena shall have been included in our returns, and all that is special and exceptional shall have been corrected, and a result reached, not neutralized or vitiated by circum