Here, as I refer to this royal author, let me pause to offer him my tribute of gratitude. His work, originally written in Swedish, has been already twice translated into German, twice into French, once into Norwegian, and once into English. It deserves to be translated into every language of the globe. Such words from a throne find no parallel in history. All the productions from the eighteen royal authors of England, and the five of Scotland, mentioned in Walpole's Catalogue, could not confer the same true honor as these few pages. Not the "prettie versse" of Henry the Sixth; not the volume of Henry the Eighth, which has secured to his royal successors the unchangeable title of "Defender of the Faith"; not the "Counterblast to Tobacco," and other writings, teeming with pun, pedantry, vanity, Scripture, and prerogative, of James the First; not the ballads, songs, rondeaus, and poems of the four Jameses of Scotland. A work on "Punishments and Prisons" by a king, written in a spirit of simplicity and gentleness, with sympathy for the poor, the humble, the sinful, teaches us to appreciate forms of grandeur higher than any in the ordinary pursuits of royal ambition. Oscar is the son of Bernadotte, a marshal of the French Empire, and elected king of Sweden; but--pardon me while I speak what my heart feels--the author of this little book of humanity and wisdom inspires a warmer glow of admiration than the commander of the centre in the victory of Austerlitz, or of the timely succors that hurried the close of the giant struggle at Leipzig. He sits on a throne illustrated by two of the greatest sovereigns in modern Europe; but his is a truer glory than that of Gustavus Vasa in the mines of Dalecarlia, or of Gustavus Adolphus on the field of Lutzen. In Holland, the penal code established in 1840, as the basis of prison discipline, separation by night and labor in common by day. "But they were not slow to recognize the insufficiency of this," says one of the eminent authorities. Wherefore the States General ordered the system of separate imprisonment, as practised at Philadelphia, with the modifications which excluded _solitude_, separating the prisoners from each other, and securing communication with good people. In the States General there was only _one voice_ against this system. Again is our Report silent. And lastly, at Geneva, in Switzerland, a plan of a prison on the Separate System was adopted in 1842. I have here the atlas containing a full representation of this prison in all its parts. But of this, too, our Report says nothing.