The first point for consideration is the duty and pledge on our part of candor and impartiality between the different systems of Prison Discipline. Here I might, perhaps, content myself with a bare enumeration of these systems, and ask the Society if they are so fully convinced with regard to the comparative merits of each as to embrace one, and to reject, absolutely, all the others. For instance, I mention four different systems. _First_, that of Pennsylvania, so much discussed, the principal feature of which is separation of prisoners from each other both by day and night, with labor in cells. _Secondly_, that of Auburn, where the prisoners are in separate cells by night, but labor in common workshops, in _enforced silence_, by day. _Thirdly_, a system compounded of these two, according to which certain prisoners are treated as at Auburn, and certain others as in Pennsylvania,--sometimes called the Mixed System, and sometimes that of Lausanne, from the circumstance that here, in Switzerland,--interesting to us as the place where Gibbon wrote his great history,--there is a prison of this character. _Fourthly_, there is still another system,--or, perhaps, absence of system,--which is followed at Munich, and is called after Obermaier, the benevolent head of the prison in that place, who has rejected the separate cell of Pennsylvania by day, and also the corporal punishment and enforced silence of Auburn. Our own prison at Charlestown, also marked by absence of system, seems to me not unlike that of Obermaier. A similar benevolence emanates from the head of each of these institutions. In each and all of these systems there is, doubtless, much that we should hesitate to condemn, and which it becomes us, as honest inquirers, to examine carefully and seek to comprehend. Calling upon our Society for a pledge of candor and impartiality, it will not be disguised that there are special reasons from its past course. Properly to appreciate this course, and to understand the unfortunate position of ungenerous antagonism to the Pennsylvania System which we now occupy, it will be necessary to consider the origin and true character of that system. This will lead to some minuteness of historical detail. * * * * *