Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions Part 3

We complain, justly enough, that the world is governed too much; and yet, in a great degree, we neglect the means by which the proper relations of society could be preserved, and the world be governed less.

In what works are the so-called Christian governments princ.i.p.ally engaged? Are they not seeking, by artifice, diplomacy, and war, to extend national boundaries, preserve national honor, or enforce nice distinctions against the timid and weak? Yet it is plain that a nation is powerful according to the character of the living elements of which it is composed. If it is disorganized morally, uncultivated in intellect, ignorant, indolent, or wasteful in its labor, its claims to greatness are dest.i.tute of solid foundation, and it must finally yield to those that have sought and gained power by the elevation of the individual as the element of the nation.

That nation, then, is wise, and destined to become truly great, which cultivates the best elements of individual life and character. It is not enough to read the parable of the lost sheep, and of the ninety and nine that went not astray, and then say, "Even so, it is not the will of your Father which is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish,"

while the means of salvation, as regards the life of this world merely, are very generally neglected. Such neglect is followed by error and crime; and error and crime are followed by judgment not always tempered with mercy.

While human governments debate questions of war and peace, of trade and revenue, of annexations with ceremony, and appropriations of territory without ceremony, who shall answer to the Governor and Judge of all for the neglect, indifference, and oppression, which beget and foster the delinquencies of childhood, and harden the criminals of adult life?

And who shall answer for those distinctions of caste and systems of labor which so degrade and famish ma.s.ses of human beings, that the divine miracle of the feeding of the five thousand must be multiplied many times over before the truths of nature or revelation can be received into teachable minds or susceptible hearts? And who shall answer for the hereditary poverty, ignorance and crime, which const.i.tute a marked feature of English life, and are distinctly visible upon the face of American civilization? These questions may point with sufficient distinctness to the sources of the evils enumerated; but we are not to a.s.sume that mere human governments can furnish an adequate and complete remedy. Yet this admitted inability to do everything is no excuse for neglecting those things which are plainly within their power.

Taking upon themselves the parental character, forgetting that they have wrongs to avenge, and seeking reformation through kindness, criminals and the causes of crime will diminish, if they do not disappear. This is the responsibility of the nations, and the claim now made upon them.

Individual civilization and refinement have always been in advance of national; and national character is the mirrored image of the individual characters, not excepting the humblest, of which the nation is composed.

Each foot of the ocean's surface has, in its fluidity or density or position, something of the quality or power of every drop of water which rests or moves in the depths of the sea. What is called national character is the face of the great society beneath; and, as that society in its elements is elevated or debased, so will the national character rise or fall in the estimation of all just men, and upon the page of impartial history. Government, which is the organized expression of the will of society, should represent the best elements of which society is composed; and it ought, therefore, to combat error and wrong, and seek to inaugurate labor, justice, and truth, as the elements of stability, growth, and power. It must accept as its principles of action the best rules of conduct in individuals. The man who avenges his personal wrongs by personal attacks or vindictive retaliation, must sacrifice in some measure the sympathy of the wise, the humane, and the good. So the nation which avenges real or fancied wrongs crushes out the elements of humanity and a higher life, which, properly cultivated, might lead an erring mortal to virtue and peace. The proper object of punishment is not vengeance, but the public safety and the reformation of the criminal. Indeed, we may say that the sole object of punishment is the reformation of the criminal; for there can be no safety to the public while the criminal is unreformed. The punishment of the prison must, from its nature, be temporary; perpetual confinement can be meted out to a few great crimes only. If, then, the result of punishment be vengeance, and not reformation, the last state of society is worse than its first. The prison must stand a sad monument of the want of true paternal government in the family and the state; but, when it becomes the receptacle merely of the criminal, and all ideas of reformation are banished from the hearts of convicts and the minds of keepers, its influence is evil, and only evil continually.

Vice, driven from the presence of virtue, with no hope of reformation or of restoration to society, begets vice, and becomes daily more and more loathsome. Misery is so universal that some share falls to the lot of all; but that misery whose depths cannot be sounded, whose heights cannot be scaled, is the fortune of the prison convict only, who has no hope of reformation to virtue or of restoration to the world. His is the only misery that is unrelieved; his is the only burden that is too great to be borne. To him the foliage of the tree, the murmur of the brook, the mirror of the quiet lake, or the thunder of the heaving ocean, would be equally acceptable. His separation from nature is no less burdensome than his separation from man. The heart sinks, the spirit turns with a consuming fire upon itself, the soul is in despair; the mind is first nerved and desperate, then wandering and savage, then idiotic, and finally goes out in death. Governments cannot often afford to protect themselves, or to avenge themselves, at such a cost. There may be great crimes on which such awful penalties should be visited; but, for the honor of the race, let them be few.

We may err in our ideas of the true relations of the prison to the prisoner. We call a prison good or bad when we see its walls, cells, workshops, its means of security, and points of observation. These are very well. They are something; but they are not all. We might so judge a hospital for the sick; and we did once so judge an asylum for the insane.

But what to the sick man are walls of wood, brick, granite, or marble?

What are towers and turrets, what are wards, halls, and verandas, if withal he is not cheered and sustained by the sympathizing heart and helping hand? And similar preparations furnish for the insane personal security and physical comfort; but can they

"Minister to a mind diseased; Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow; Raze out the written troubles of the brain?"

And it may be that the old almshouse at Philadelphia, which was nearly dest.i.tute of material aids, and had only superintendent, matrons, and a.s.sistants, was, all in all, the best insane asylum in America.

We cannot neglect the claims of security, discipline, and labor, in the erection of jails and prisons; but to acknowledge these merely will never produce the proper fruit of punishment--reformation. Indeed, walls of stone, gates of iron, bolts, locks, and armed sentinels, though essential to security, without which there could be neither punishment nor reformation, are in themselves barriers rather than helps to moral progress. Standing outside, we cannot say what should be done either in the insane hospital or the prison; but we can deduce from the experience of modern times a safe rule for general conduct. In the insane hospital the patient is to be treated as though he were sane; and in the jail the prisoner is to be treated, nearly as may be, as though he were virtuous.

This rule, especially as much of it as applies to the prisoner, may be recklessness to some, to others folly, to others sin.

"The court awards it, and the law doth give it," is no doubt the essence and strength of governmental justice in the sentence decreed; but it would be a sad calamity if there were no escape from its literal fulfilment. And let no one borrow the words of Portia to the Jew, and say to the state,

"Nor cut thou less nor more, But just a pound of flesh."

As the criminal staggers beneath the acc.u.mulated weight of his sin and its penalty, he should feel that the state is not only just in the language of its law, but merciful in its administration; that the government is, in truth, paternal. This feeling inspires confidence and hope; and without these there can be no reformation. And, following this thought, we are led to say, it is a sad and mischievous public delusion that the pardoning power is useless or pernicious. It is a _delusion_; for it is the only means by which the state mingles mercy with its justice,--the means by which the better sentiments of the prison are marshalled in favor of order, of law, of progress. It is a _public delusion_; for it has infected not only the ma.s.ses of society, who know little of what is going on in courts and prisons, but its influence is observed upon the bench and in the bar, especially among those who are accustomed to prosecute and try criminals. This is not strange, nor shall it be a subject of complaint; but we must not always look upon the prisoner as a criminal, and continually disregard his claims as a man.

It is not often easy, nor always possible, to make the proper distinction between the _character_ and _condition_ of the prisoner. But the prison, strange as it may seem, follows the general law of life. It has its public sentiment, its cla.s.ses, its leading minds, as well as the university or the state; it has its men of mark, either good or bad, as well as congress or parliament. As the family, the church, or the school, is the reflection of the best face of society, so the prison is the reflection of the worst face of society. But it nevertheless is society, and follows its laws with as much fidelity as the world at large.

It is said that Abbe Fissiaux, the head of the colony of Ma.r.s.eilles, when visiting Mettray, a kind of reform school, at which boys under sixteen years of age, who have committed offences without discernment, are sent, asked the colonists to point out to him the three best boys.

The looks of the whole body immediately designated three young persons whose conduct had been irreproachable to an exceptional degree. He then applied a more delicate test. "Point out to me," said he, "the worst boy." All the children remained motionless, and made no sign; but one little urchin came forward, with a pitiful air, and said, in a very low tone, "_It is me._" Such were the public sentiment and sense of honor, even in a reform school. This frankness in the lad was followed by reformation; and he became in after years a good soldier,--the life antic.i.p.ated for many members of the inst.i.tution.

The pardoning power is not needed in reform and industrial schools, where the managers have discretionary authority; but it is quite essential to the discipline of the prison to let the light of hope into the prisoner's heart. Not that all are to enjoy the benefits of executive clemency,--by no means: only the most worthy and promising are to be thus favored. But, for many years, the Ma.s.sachusetts prison has been improved and elevated in its tone and sentiment above what it would have been; while, as it is believed, over ninety per cent. of the convicts thus discharged have conducted themselves well. If the prisoner's conduct has not been, upon the whole, reasonably good, and for a long time irreproachable, he has no chance for clemency; and, whatever may be his conduct, and whatever may be the hopes inspired, he should not be allowed to pa.s.s without the prison walls until a friend, labor, and a home, are secured for him. And the exercise of the pardoning power, if it antic.i.p.ate the expiration of the legal sentence but a month, a week, or a day even, may change the whole subsequent life. Men, criminals, convicts, are not insensible to kindness; and when the government shortens the legal sentence, which is usually their measure of justice, they feel an additional obligation to so behave as to bring no discredit upon a power which has been a source of inestimable joy to them. And prisoners thus discharged have often gone forth with a feeling that the hopes of many whom they had left behind were centred in them.

Mr. Charles Forster, of Charlestown, says, in a letter to me: "I have been connected with the Ma.s.sachusetts State Prison for a period of thirty-eight years, and have always felt a strong interest in the improvement, welfare, and happiness, of the unfortunate men confined within its walls. I am conversant with many touching cases of deep and heartfelt grat.i.tude for kindly acts and sympathy bestowed upon them, both during and subsequent to their imprisonment." And the same gentleman says further, "I think that the proportion of persons discharged from prison by executive clemency, who have subsequently been convicted of penal offences, is very small indeed." To some, whose imaginations have pictured a broad waste or deep gulf between themselves and the prisoner cla.s.s, these may seem strange words; but there is no mystery in this language to those who have listened to individual cases of crime and punishment. Men are tried and convicted of crimes according to rules and definitions which are necessarily arbitrary and technical; but the moral character of criminals is not very well defined by the rules and definitions which have been applied to their respective cases.

Our prisons contain men who are great and professional criminals,--men who advisedly follow a life of crime themselves, and deliberately educate generation after generation to a career of infamy and vice. As a general thing, mercy to such men would be unpardonable folly. Of them I do not now speak. But there is another cla.s.s, who are involved in guilt and its punishment through the defects of early education, the misfortune of orphanage, accident, sudden temptation, or the influence of evil companions.h.i.+p in youth.

The field from which this cla.s.s is gathered is an extensive one, and its outer limits are near to every hearthstone. To all these, prison life, unless it is relieved by a hope of restoration to the world at the hand of mercy, is the school of vice, and a certain preparation for a career of crime. As a matter of fact, this cla.s.s does furnish recruits to supply the places of the hardened villains who annually die, or permanently forsake the abodes of civilized men. What hope can there be for a young man who remains in prison until the last day of his sentence is measured by the sun in his course, and then pa.s.ses into the world, with the mark of disgrace and the mantle of shame upon him, to the society of the companions by whose influence he first fell? For such a one there can be no hope. And be it always remembered that there are those without the prison walls, as well as many within, who resist every effort to bring the wanderers back to obedience and right. I was present at the prison in Charlestown when the model of a bank-lock was taken from a young man whose term had nearly expired. The model was cut in wood, after a plan drawn upon sand-paper by an experienced criminal, then recently convicted. This old offender was so familiar with the lock, that he was able to reproduce all its parts from memory alone.

This fact shows the influence that may be exerted, even in prison, upon the characters of the young and less vicious. Now, can any doubt that these cla.s.ses, as cla.s.ses, ought to be separated? Nor let the question be met by the old statement, that all communication between prisoners should be cut off. Humanity cannot defend, as a permanent system, the plan which shuts up the criminal, unless he is a murderer, from the light of the human countenance. Such penalties foster crimes, whose roots take hold of the state itself.

The result of the exercise of the pardoning power is believed to have been, upon the whole, satisfactory. This is the concurrent testimony of officers and others whose opinions are ent.i.tled to weight. Permit the statement of a single case, to which many similar ones might be added.

In a remote state of the West there is a respectable and successful farmer, who was once sentenced to the penitentiary for life. His crime was committed in a moment of desperation, produced by the contrast between a state of abject poverty in a strange land, at the age of twenty-three, and the recollection of childhood and youth pa.s.sed beneath the parental roof, surrounded by the comforts and conveniences of the well-educated and well-conditioned cla.s.ses of English society. This, it is true, was a peculiar case. It was marked in the circ.u.mstances and enormity of the crime, and marked in the subsequent good conduct of the prisoner. But can any one object, that, after ten years' imprisonment, this man was allowed to try his fortunes once more among his fellow-men?

Are there those who would have had no faith in his uninterrupted good conduct; in the abundant evidence of complete reformation; in the fact that, in prison and poverty and disgrace, he had allied to him friends of name and fortune and Christian virtues, who were ready to aid him in his good resolutions? If any such there be, let them visit the solitary cell of the despairing convict, whose crime is so great that executive clemency fears to approach it. Crime and despair have made the features appalling; all the worst pa.s.sions of our nature riot together in the temple made for the living G.o.d; and the death of the body is almost certainly to be preceded by madness, insanity, and idiocy of the mind.

Or, if any think that this person escaped with too light an expiation for so great a crime, let them recall the incident of the youth who was questioned because he looked with fond affection into the babbling face of the running brook, and, apologizing, as it were, in reply said, "O, yes, it is very beautiful, and especially to me, who have seen no water for four years, beside what I have had to drink!"

Nor is it a.s.sumed, in all that is said upon this subject, that the laws are severe, or that the judicial administration of them is not characterized by justice and mercy. In the ordinary course of affairs, the pardoning power is not resorted to for the correction of any error or injustice of the courts; but it is the means by which the state tempers its justice with mercy; and, if the penalties for crime were less than they are, the necessity for the exercise of this power would still remain. It a.s.sumes that the object of the penal law is reformation; and if this object, in some cases, can be attained by the exercise of the pardoning power, while the rigid execution of the sentence would leave the criminal, as it usually will, still hardened and unrepenting, is it not wise for the state to benefit itself, and save the prisoner, by opening the prison-doors, and inviting the convict to a life of industry and virtue? And let it never be forgotten, though it is the lowest view which can be taken of crime and prisons, that the criminal cla.s.s is the most expensive cla.s.s of society. In general, it is a non-producing cla.s.s, and, whether in prison or out, is a heavy burden upon the public. The mere interest of the money now expended in prisons of approved structure is, for each cell, equal annually to the net income of a laboring man; and professional thieves, when at large, often gather by their art, and expend in profligacy, many thousand dollars a year. And here we see how much wiser it is, in an economical point of view, to save the child, or reform the man, than to allow the adult criminal to go at large, or provide for his safe-keeping at the expense of the state.

Under the influence of the pardoning power, wisely executed, the commonwealth becomes a family, whose law is the law of kindness. It is the paternal element of government applied to a cla.s.s of people who, by every process of reasoning, would be found least susceptible to its influence. It is the great power of the state, both in the wisdom required for its judicious exercise, and in the beneficial results to which it may lead. Men may desire office for its emoluments in money or fame; they may seek it in a spirit of rivalry, or for personal pride, or for the opportunity it brings to reward friends and punish enemies; but all these are poor and paltry compared with the divine privilege, exercised always in reference to the public welfare, of elevating the prisoner to the companions.h.i.+p of men, and cheering him with words of encouragement on his entrance anew to the duties of life.

Yet think not that the prison is a reformatory inst.i.tution: far from it.

If the prison should be left to the influence of legitimate prison discipline merely, it is doubtful whether the sum of improvement would equal the total of degradation. This may be said of the best prisons of America, of New England. The prison usually contains every cla.s.s, from the hardened convict, incarcerated for house-breaking, robbery, or murder, to the youth who expiates his first offence, committed under the influence of evil companions, or sudden temptation. The contact of these two persons must be injurious to one of them, without in any degree improving the other. Therefore the prison, considered without reference to the elevating influence of the pardoning power, has but little ability to reform the bad, and yet possesses a sad tendency to debase the comparatively good.

We miss, too, in the prison, another essential element of a reformatory inst.i.tution. Reformation in individual cases may take place under the most adverse circ.u.mstances; but an inst.i.tution cannot be called reformatory unless its prevailing moral sentiment is actively, vigorously, and always, on the side of progress and virtue. This moral influence must proceed from the officers of the inst.i.tution; but it should be increased and strengthened by the sympathy and support of the inmates. This can hardly be expected of the prison. The number of adult persons experienced in crime and hardened by its penalties is usually so large, that the moral sentiment of the officers, and the weak resolutions of the small cla.s.s of prisoners, who, under favorable circ.u.mstances, might be saved, are insufficient to give a healthy tone to the whole inst.i.tution. The prison is a battle-field of vice and virtue, with the advantage of position and numbers on the side of vice.

Indeed, there can hardly be a worse place for the young or the inexperienced in crime. This is the testimony of reason and of all experience; yet the public mind is slow to accept the remedy for the evil. It is a privilege to believe that the worst scenes of prison life are not found in the United States. Consider this case, reported in an English journal, _The Ragged-School Magazine_:

"D. F., aged about fourteen. Mother dead several years; father a drunkard, and deserted him about three years ago. Has since lived as he best could,--sometimes going errands, sometimes begging and thieving.

Slept in lodging-houses when he had money; but very often walked the streets at night, or lay under arches or door-steps. Has only one brother; he lives by thieving. Does not know where he is; has no other friend that he knows; never learnt to read; was badly off; picked a handkerchief out of a gentleman's pocket, and was caught by a policeman; sent to Giltspur-street Prison; was fed on bread and water; instructed every day by chaplain and schoolmaster; much impressed with what the chaplain said; felt anxious to do better; behaved well in prison; _was well flogged the morning he left; back bruised, but not quite bleeding_; was then turned into the street, ragged, barefooted, friendless, homeless, penniless; walked about the streets till afternoon, when he received a penny from a gentleman to buy a loaf; met, next day, some expert thieves in the Minories; went along with them, and continues in a course of vagrancy and crime."

And what else could have been expected? The government, having sown tares, had no right to gather wheat. Yet, had this boy been provided with a home, either in a family or a reform school, with sufficient labor, and proper moral and intellectual culture, he might have been saved. Of the three thousand persons annually in prison at Newgate, four hundred are less than sixteen years of age; and twenty thousand children and youth under seventeen years of age yearly pa.s.s through the prisons of England. "Many of the juvenile prisoners," it is said, "have been frequently in prison, and are very hardened. Some, from nine to eleven, have been in prison repeatedly, and have very little fear of it."

The officers of the Liverpool Borough Jail are united in the opinion that, when a boy comes once, he is almost certain to come again and again, until he is transported. And, of every one hundred young persons discharged from the princ.i.p.al prisons of Paris, seventy-five are in the custody of the law within the next three months. A professed thief said to the Rev. Mr. Clay, of England, "I am convinced of this, having too bitterly experienced it, that communication in a prison has brought thousands to ruin. I speak not of boys only, but of men and women also."

And Mr. Hill, Recorder of Birmingham, says of the sentences imposed in his court, "We are compelled to carry into operation an ignorant and vengeful system, which augments to a fearful extent the very evils it was framed to correct." A few years ago, there was a lad in a New England prison whose experience is a pertinent ill.u.s.tration of the evil we are now considering. His father, a resident of a city, died while the boy was in infancy. He, however, soon pa.s.sed beyond the control of his mother, and at an early age was selected by a brace of thieves, who petted, caressed, and humored him, until he was completely subject to their will. He was then made useful to them in their profession; but at last they were all arrested while engaged in robbing a store,--the boy being within the building, and the men stationed as sentinels without.

In this case, the discretion of the court, which distinguished in the sentence between the hardened villains and the youth, was inadequate to the emergency. The child, unfit for the prison, and sure to be contaminated by it, ought to have been sent to a house of reformation, a reform school, or, perhaps better than either, to the custody of a well-regulated, industrious family. Now, in such cases, the distinction which the law, judicially administered, does not make, and cannot make, must be made by the executive in the wise exercise of the pardoning power. But this power, in the nature of things, has its limits; and on one side it is limited to those who have been convicted of crime.

At this point, we may see how faulty, and yet how constantly improving, has been the administration of the criminal law. First, we have the prison without the pardoning power, except in cases of mal-administration of the law,--a receptacle of the bad and good, where the former are not improved, and the latter are hurried rapidly on in the path of degradation and crime. Then we have the prison under the influence of the pardoning power, more or less wisely administered, but, in its best form, able only to arrest and counteract partially the tendencies to evil. Next, from the imperfections of this system an advancing civilization has evoked the Reform School, which gathers in the young criminals and viciously inclined youth, and prepares them, by labor, and culture of the mind and heart, to resist the temptations of life. But this inst.i.tution seems to wait, though it may not always in reality do so, until the candidate is actually a criminal.

Hence the necessity which calls us to-day to consider the means adopted elsewhere, and the means now to be employed here, to save the young and exposed from the dangers which surround them.

Pa.s.sing, then, in review, ladies and gentlemen, the thoughts which have been presented, I deduce from them for your a.s.sent and support, if so it please you, the following propositions as the basis of what I have yet to say:

I. Government, in the prevention and punishment of crime, should be paternal.

II. The object of punishment should be reformation, and not revenge.

III. The law of reformation in the state, as in the family, is the law of kindness.

IV. As criminals vary in age and in experience as criminals, so should their treatment vary.

V. Prisons and jails are not, in their foundation and management, reformatory inst.i.tutions, and only become so through influences not necessarily nor ordinarily acting upon them.

VI. As prisons and jails deter from crime through fear only, exert very little moral influence upon the youth of either s.e.x, and fail in many respects and in a majority of cases as reformatory inst.i.tutions, we ought to avail ourselves of any new agency which promises success.

Influenced, as we may reasonably suppose, by these or kindred sentiments, and aided by the n.o.blest exhibitions of private benevolence, the state has here founded a school for the prevention of crime. As we have everywhere among us schools whose _leading_ object is the development of the intellect, so we now dedicate a school whose _leading_ object is the development of the affections as the basis of the cardinal virtues of life.

The design of this inst.i.tution is so well expressed by the trustees, that it is a favor to us all for me to read the first chapter of the by-laws, which, by the consent of the Governor and Council, have been established:

"The intention of the state government, and of the benevolent individuals who have contributed to the establishment of this inst.i.tution, is to secure a _home_ and a _school_ for such girls as may be presented to the magistrates of the state, appointed for that purpose, as vagrants, perversely obstinate, deprived of the control and culture of their natural guardians, or guilty of petty offences, and exposed to a life of crime and wretchedness.

"For such young persons it is proposed to provide, not a prison for their restraint and correction, but a family school, where, under the firm but kind discipline of a judicious home, they shall be carefully instructed in all the branches of a good education; their moral affections be developed and cultivated by the example and affectionate care of one who shall hold the relation of a mother to them; be instructed in useful and appropriate forms of female industry; and, in short, be fitted to become virtuous and happy members of society, and to take respectable positions in such relations in life as Providence shall hereafter mark out for them.