the place of oaths and vulgarity, and a _resolution_ at least to try to lead a better life,--if all this may be accounted in the direction of reform, then, Yes, a thousand times Yes, we reform all that come within our reach.” The prison in itself is all well, but the danger lies beyond in the temptations, the lures, and the traps of the community into which this poor, weak creature is plunged in her first hour of regained liberty. I never saw one of these women go out with her little bundle of freedom suit, and watched the eager yet timid and half-frightened look on her face, and felt the childlike, clinging grasp upon mine, and heard the universal “Good-bye, don’t forget me,” that through the tears a great prayer did not rise up in my heart, “O God, strengthen her weakness--guard her from the temptations and the snares leading her down to death, of Thy virtuous and free, outside these prison walls.” I recall once an official visit from about twenty members of the State Legislature, at Boston, for the purpose of overlooking the prison and seeing what it might need and how it could be best officially served; accordingly they appealed to _me_ for my opinion generally--if the prison were what it should be in its _appointments_, if it were _large_ enough or _too_ large, etc., and in a general way what I would recommend to them to do; as by recent Act they had made me not only Superintendent but Treasurer and Steward as well. I replied: “This Prison is all very well--a model prison and certainly as large as it ought to be for the size of the State; and it is very probable that there is not very much that you can directly do for it at present, as an Institution; but, Gentlemen, the Institution from which you come has the making of the laws by which this Institution exists; any time when you _there_ will find a way to make it impossible for the people of this State to get intoxicating liquors, upon which to get drunk, I will guarantee that in six months the State of Massachusetts may rent Sherborn for a shoe manufactory.” I am not sure that _they_ believed what I said, but _I_ did and still do. True, crime will exist without drunkenness, but to no such extent as to require two miles of prison galleries for the women of Massachusetts. In _this_ country I regard drunkenness as the great father of crime, and the mother of prisons, almshouses, asylums, and workhouses--the parent of vice and want and the instigator of murder. Whatever bears ever so little against this is to my mind “Prison Reform.” Then follow in their mournful train the sin-bound _cortège_ of primal and secondary causes of vice and crime and which make necessary the various methods of treatment which have been so ably discovered that no words of mine could throw a single ray of added light upon the subject. I can only _concur_, or perhaps express suggestively some preferences which may have presented themselves to me.