The choice of Prison Inspectors and School Commissioners and overseers of education and reformation should uniformly fall on those who are, on the whole, best qualified to serve, irrespective of all political relations and considerations. If we must have a new set of officers introduced into our prisons, and a new set of teachers and text-books into our schools, whenever a revolution occurs in the position of political parties, neither our prisons nor our schools will prove to be of much value. When we can trace all the ignorance and all the crime of the community to the door of one political party, we may be disposed to charge on them the burden of taking care of dolts and rogues; but so long as both are common to all political parties, it seems more wise and equitable to draw from all the best skill in the greatest force they can yield to enlighten the one and punish or (if possible) extirpate the other. VI. There is another negative qualification of prison Inspectors--not mentioned last because we esteem it of the least consideration--and that is the absence of all morbid and whimsical philosophy about the _origin_ of criminal acts. There are some people who may, with comparative harmlessness, indulge their fancy in framing theories to account for crime, without involving criminality. They may amuse themselves by analogies between the irregularities of the skull and the proclivities to particular crimes, or by tracing a disposition to larceny, robbery and murder to some physiological mal-formation, for which the offending party is no more responsible than for his stature or complexion. Or they may discover a process by which to lay the blame of all crime on society, and show to their own satisfaction that when a foul murder is committed, “Society” should be hung as the real offender, and not the poor wretch whom (as they would say) the “state of society” has betrayed into the commission of the deed! This is not an imaginary supposition. Our own ears have heard a man of much repute for active philanthropy, and sharing quite generously in the confidence of the community, assert in an address to a large public assembly, concerning a woman who was then under sentence for the wilful murder of her child, that she was not the blame-worthy party--“She went,” he said, “from door to door, and sought work. All objected to employing her because she was incumbered with a child. Finding this incumbrance a bar to her success, she threw it into the Schuylkill river, and who would blame her?” asked the popular orator. “Those who turned her from their doors are the guilty ones, and should now be where she is, and in her place suffer the extreme penalty of the law!”