There is a wide difference between a seasonable encouragement of attempts to amend one’s life, and a blind confidence in professions and promises. A kind look or word at a propitious moment, in the progress of penal suffering, changes the whole influence of it. A frown or a repulse will freeze into impenetrable hardness a heart that might be melted into penitence by timely compassion and sympathy. If prisoners are treated with less tenderness by Inspectors than is shown to the wild beasts of a menagerie, we must expect them to resemble wild beasts in ferocity when they are let loose. The true light in which Inspectors should regard themselves is, as protectors of the public against danger from such a source. They are appointed to superintend a process by which the ferocious passions of a man may be subdued--his vicious inclinations changed and right moral feelings and habits implanted. If the highest and best object of penitentiary discipline is attained, he who is received under it as a tiger, is discharged from it as a lamb. The infrequency of such a transformation might not be so striking if Inspectors executed their functions in a proper spirit. Not only would their personal and official influence contribute more directly to this result, but the whole economy and discipline of the prison under their charge would take the same direction. V. We have only to add, that no _political_ influences or considerations should be allowed weight in the appointment of prison-inspectors. We need not say that this remark has no local application, though we have no doubt that it would receive the hearty concurrence even of those who may regard the avoidance of such influences as quite impracticable. Political parties live by power and patronage. Offices of honor or emolument are the bribes that tempt men into the strife for party-supremacy, and upon a due distribution of these depends its maintenance, when it has been attained. But there are some posts which involve labor rather than honor. The emoluments of them but poorly compensate for the pains and self-denials they impose, and the duties require qualifications so peculiar and so rare, that we cannot afford to restrict the field of selection to any party. It is difficult enough to fill them properly, “with the world before us where to choose,” but the difficulty is rendered almost insuperable when a large portion of the community, and possibly an actual majority, are excluded, as out of political caste.