Now, our present method is wholly inadequate to reform men exposed to such circumstances. You may punish the man, but it does no good. You can seldom frighten men out of a fever. Can you frighten them from crime, when they know little of the internal distinction between right and wrong; when all the circumstances about them impel to crime? Can you frighten a starving girl into chastity? You cannot keep men from lewdness, theft and violence, when they have no self-respect, no culture, no development of mind, heart, and soul. The jail will not take the place of the church, of the school-house, of home. It will not remove the causes which are making new criminals. It does not reform the old ones. Shall we shut men in a jail, and when there treat them with all manner of violence, crush out the little self-respect yet left, give them a degrading dress, and send them into the world cursed with an infamous name, and all that because they were born in the low places of society and caught the stain thereof? The jail does not alter the circumstances which occasioned the crime, and till these causes are removed a fresh crop will spring out of the festering soil. Some men teach dogs and horses things unnatural to these animals; they use violence and blows as their instrument of instruction. But to teach man what is conformable to his nature, something more is required. To return to the other class, who are born criminals. Bare confinement in the prison alters no man's constitutional tendencies; it can no more correct moral or mental weakness or obliquity than it can correct a deficiency of the organs of sensation. You all know the former treatment of men born with defective or deranged intellectual faculties--of madmen and fools. We still pursue the same course towards men born with defective or deranged moral faculties, idiots and madmen of a more melancholy class, and with a like result. I know how easy it is to find fault, and how difficult to propose a better way; how easy to misunderstand all that I have said, how easy to misrepresent it all. But it seems to me that hitherto we have set out wrong in this undertaking; have gone on wrong, and, by the present means, can never remove the causes of crime nor much improve the criminals as a class. Let me modestly set down my thoughts on this subject, in hopes that other men, wiser and more practical, will find out a way yet better still. A jail, as a mere house of punishment for offenders, ought to have no place in an enlightened people. It ought to be a moral hospital where the offender is kept till he is cured. That his crime is great or little, is comparatively of but small concern. It is wrong to detain a man against his will after he is cured; wrong to send him out before he is cured, for he will rob and corrupt society, and at last miserably perish. We shall find curable cases and incurable.