In presenting the Report of the Seventy-Eighth Year of the labors of “The Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons,” we are struck with what in this country may be regarded as a remarkable instance of longevity. Few benevolent societies in the United States survive their founders. Some effect a certain object and are allowed to fall into uselessness and disorganization. Others arise, with kindred purposes and similar means, and produce other good with an advantage of new zeal and fresh machinery. In Europe numerous philanthropic associations have outlived their usefulness, not so much from a diminution of the numbers that need aid, as from changes in their circumstances. The funds do not fail, but the right to apply them, in the changed condition of society, has ceased. The continued existence of the association is secured by the capital upon which it was founded, and the lumbering machinery is annually reviewed by those charged with its custody, and it is then consigned to another year’s seclusion and repose. The dust of antiquity settles upon it, to give it an interest with some, but the idea of usefulness is no longer entertained. In many of the cases of defunct associations in _this_ country, the wrongs or sufferings that suggested their organization were only temporary, and with the accomplishment of their objects they ceased to exist, or they have given place to others better adapted to the good ends proposed. Most of the still remaining inoperative associations of the old world were called into existence by permanent evils, but their usefulness was made temporary by certain fixed requirements that were soon to render them inapplicable to the changes in the political, religious and social condition of the people. But “The Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons,” has before it a work, which though it may vary with time, is not likely to lessen. While society exists we shall have vice and crime; while vice and crime abound we must have prisons to restrain the violators of the laws; and while prisons have inmates, the duty of reforming their morals and ameliorating their condition, will devolve upon some of those who seek the good of society by the improvement of individuals. That duty in its broadest sense has been assumed by this Association. Not merely to lessen the sufferings of the condemned, not alone to assist the innocent, not merely to teach sound morals to those who are suffering from a violation of the laws of God and man, not merely to prevent a too rigid enforcement of special enactments, not alone to prescribe and ensure a separate confinement to the condemned, but so to use that confinement that vice or crime, so communicable in its character, shall not propagate itself through the cells of the prison, and thus make a penitentiary a nursery for misconduct rather than a school for mental and moral discipline; not alone to deal justly and faithfully with a