The Society looks back with much gratification upon its labors. The existing active members feel how much they owe to the philanthropic efforts of the founders of the Association, and to those, who, having exerted themselves with corresponding zeal in the good cause, have bequeathed to men of this day the _improved_ work, and the augmented duties. Every point gained developes the resources of humanity, while it presents new objects for its exercise. How prisons are conducted, and how prisoners are treated, where there is no voluntary organization to alleviate their suffering, history and the report of travelers tell. Undoubtedly religion meliorates the condition of the incarcerated, whether his offence be vice or crime; but religion supplies itself with means and instruments for its holy work, and we look for good results only where there have been corresponding means. To find the effects of unalleviated punishment upon tried offenders, is not necessary to look far back into ages which the world calls “dark,” because light was less diffused than at present; it is only to seek the nation or community where arbitrary power not only inflicts the wrong of too severe punishment, but, by its terrors, prevents the suggestion and adoption of means by the humane which may lessen the effect of the severity, by keeping between the sufferer and the world a connection of feeling and sympathy that will lead him to resolve some good when the punishment for the bad shall have been all inflicted, which shall make him feel, indeed, that this will be a use to him of virtue, and that he may hereafter have a reward in the recognition of its existence in him by the society to which he may be spared. Seek the government that understands by criminal law only the punishment of the guilty, and we shall see that authority seizes the violator of its enactments or decrees, and treats him as if all of humanity had perished in him with the conception of his crime, and, dragging him from the decencies, the enjoyments and the hopes of society, it Chains him, and tasks him, and exacts his sweat With stripes, that mercy, with a bleeding heart, Weeps when she sees inflicted on a beast. The difference between that mode of dealing with the convict and the lesser evil, that of allowing him to perish in inactivity, and acquire strength in bad resolves, and instruction for future crimes, is what policy and unaided humanity have wrought out of the condition of the offender. The difference between the latter condition and that of the inmates of the Philadelphia County Prison, and especially the Eastern Penitentiary, is what results from the labor of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Prisons. It is something, in the first contrast, that the convict has a prison; it is more, in the latter, that the prison is made a school of physical and moral reform.