My work is done, and I am happy. The task which I have now finished is of that unpleasant kind which few human beings have ever voluntarily undertaken. It has led me through wide fields of blight, in which scarcely a green thing has been left to smile. My path has been amidst fragments of moral ruin, where serpents of corruption have lurked and hissed. My canopy has been the beclouded past in which the sun, moon, or stars are seldom seen. I have heard the voice of man, but it has been in expressions of angry authority, or of uncompassionated distress. I have seen "the human face divine," but it was either transformed into cruelty, and sullen with a spirit of revenge, or distorted with agony and fixed in despair. I have shivered under the frost of death, and contemplated a thousand awful epitaphs on the grave stones of the soul. Of the volume which I am now bringing to a close, I can say in the presence of my Creator, that I designed it as a sacrifice to benevolence; and I have labored to render it an acceptable one. I have plead the cause of the suffering sinner. I have opened to view his dungeon; pointed to his fetters--his bleeding back--his neglected sickness--his unheeded death. I have recorded facts; have argued from the principles of humanity and religion; have plead, entreated, exhorted, and prayed with christians to think of the captive, and cheer his gloomy cell with the light of the gospel. What more can I do? Nothing; and whatever may be the future sufferings of my brethren in prison, I am innocent. In the course of the volume I have advanced the following opinions.--_In the present state of society, Penitentiaries cannot be very useful as means of reformation.--Cruel discipline will harden the sufferer, and nothing but goodness can ever win back a sinner to the love and practice of virtue.--Prisoners are criminally neglected by christians.--The loss of character is a calamity, from which the universal sentiment of mankind admits of no redemption.--The conduct of christians towards prisoners and repentant sinners, is directly opposed to the law of God and the principles of their profession._ These and other truths, equally plain and important, are to be found scattered through the book, and I submit them to the religious consideration of all concerned. In speaking of the "_Prison Discipline Society_," I have used pointed language. Convinced that it is an _un_-benevolent society, laboring, _conscientiously_, no doubt, to effect the good of community, but in a way that will certainly multiply the evils it is aiming to cure, I could not use any other than emphatic terms to express my disapprobation of its measures. Already has it plunged the subjects of its discipline into the gulf of a most horrid despotism, and should it go successfully onward, its measures will spread over and carry through all our penitentiaries, the unbroken gloom and unregarded misery of the worst prisons in Europe.