It seems to me that our whole criminal legislation is based on a false principle--force and not love; that it is eminently well adapted to revenge, not at all to correct, to teach, to cure. The whole apparatus for the punishment of offenders, from the gallows down to the House of Correction, seems to me wrong; wholly wrong, unchristian, and even inhuman. We teach crime while we punish it. Is it consistent for the State to take vengeance when I may not? Is it better for the State to kill a man in cold blood, than for me to kill my brother when in a rage? I cannot help thinking that the gallows and even the jail, as now administered, are practical teachers of violence and wrong! I cannot think it will always be so. Hitherto we have looked on criminals as voluntary enemies of mankind. We have treated them as wild beasts, not as dull or loitering boys. We have sought to destroy by death, to disable by mutilation or imprisonment, to terrify and subdue, not to convince, to reform, encourage, and bless. The history of the past is full of prophecy for the future. Not many years ago we shut up our lunatics in jails, in dungeons, in cages; we chained the maniac with iron; we gave him a bottle of water and a sack of straw; we left him in filth, in cold and nakedness. We set strong and brutal men to watch him. When he cried, when he gnashed his teeth and tore his hair, we beat him all the more! They do so yet in some places, for they think a madman is not a brother but a devil. What was the result? Madness was found incurable. Now lunacy is a disease, to be prescribed for as fever or rheumatism; when we find an incurable case we do not kill the man, nor chain him, nor count him a devil. Yet lunacy is not curable by force, by jails, dungeons, and cages; only by the medicine of wise men and good men. What if Christ had met one demoniac with a whip and another with chains! You know how we once treated criminals! with what scourgings and mutilations, what brandings, what tortures with fire and red-hot iron! Death was not punishment enough, it must be protracted amid the most cruel torments that quivering flesh could bear. The multitude looked on and learned a lesson of deadly wickedness. A judicial murder was a holiday! It is but little more than two hundred years since a man was put to death in the most enlightened country of Europe for eating meat on Friday; not two hundred since men and women were hanged in Massachusetts for a crime now reckoned impossible! It is not a hundred years since two negro slaves were judicially burned alive in this very city! These facts make us shudder, but hope also. In a hundred years from this day will not men look on our gallows, jails, and penal law as we look on the racks, the torture-chambers of the middle ages, and the bloody code of remorseless inquisitors?