I entered that prison feeling myself so ignorant of all that pertained to its line of work and methods and thought, that it seemed to me positively _wicked_, to waste my own time and that of the community and those who must come under me, in the strengthless, thoughtless vacancy of my attempted work--I seemed to myself a kind of empty balloon. At the end of eight months I went out of it, with a burden of thoughts, plans, ways and means, possible and impossible, under which my body could scarcely hold itself erect or my feet carry me away. I seemed more to myself like an already heavy-ladened ship, which had met another in distress and taken on shipwrecked passengers and crew, till her gunwales hugged the water and her laboring wheels wearily tugged for the land. So piled, so criss-crossed, so intricate, so vast, contradictory, perplexing, so vexed by customs, so hampered by foolish laws, so bound by mercenary ends, so fettered by political ambitions, aspirations, asperities and jealousies, to say nothing of the immutable laws of natural descent as related to crime--so discouraging was all this to be faced from the latter half of a busy life that I wearily and gladly turned and laid the burden down on the hands of you skilled laborers, and have mainly been content to feel and leave it there. The subject of prison reform seems to me to be so vast, and the methods by which it is to be attempted so varied, that it can scarcely be touched in one talk. The first question might be, What is meant by prison reform? and in what degree? Palliation or cure? I well remember the one question which always confronted me from visitors at Sherborn--“Miss Barton, how is it, do you really reform any one here?” My reply was, “That depends upon what _you_ consider reform to consist in. If you mean to ask if we take women here, badly born, worse raised, with inherited, habitual, vagrant crime in their natures, with the grogshop and the brothel for their teachers, who never lived a decent day or knew a decent night, filthy inside and out, and that by a residence of a few months here we are able to send them out to you not only good, well-behaved, industrious, cleanly, sober, orderly, honest, respectable members of society,--something they never were before,--infallible, proof against all the temptations and vices which you of the free community on the outside may throw in their path, so they shall never fall again; then, No, we reform no one, and our prison is a failure; but, if reform may mean that the habits which must incidentally grow up in the minds, characters, and tastes of these women during a term of two years of sober, industrious, and instructed life, in which they shall see only cleanliness and order, where the workroom shall replace the street, the quiet cell, the school-room, and the chapel in the place of the grogshop and the brothel, kindly spoken words of advice, prayer, praise, and song in