curable by force, by gaols, dungeons, and cages; only by the medicine of wise men and good men. What if Christ had met one demoniac with a whip and another with chains!
You know how we once treated criminals! with what scourgings and mutilations, what brandings, what tortures with fire and red-hot iron! Death was not punishment enough, it must be protracted amid the most cruel torments that quivering flesh could bear. The multitude looked on and learned a lesson of deadly wickedness. A judicial murder was a holiday! It is but little more than two hundred years since a man was put to death in the most enlightened country of Europe for eating meat on Friday; not two hundred since men and women were hanged in Massachusetts for a crime now reckoned impossible! It is not a hundred years since two negro slaves were judicially burned alive in this very city! These facts make us shudder, but hope also. In a hundred years from this day will not men look on our gallows, gaols, and penal law as we look, on the racks, the torture-chambers of the Middle Ages, and the bloody code of remorseless inquisitors?
We need only to turn our attention to this subject to find a better way. We shall soon see that punishment as such is an evil to the criminal, and so swells the sum of suffering with which society runs over; that it is an evil also to the community at large by abstracting valuable force from profitable work, and so a loss.[1] We shall one day re-
- ↑ The period of confinement in our State's prisons differs a good deal in the various States, as will appear from the following table.
Whole No. in prison. Average sentence. In Conn. 189 March 31, 1841 7 yrs. 3 mos. Va. 181 Sept. 30, 1839 6 yrs.„ 10mos.„ Mass. 322 Sept. 30, 1840 5 yrs.„ 9 mos.„ La. 68 Sept. 30, 1839 5 yrs.„ 1 mos.„ N. J. 152 Sept. 30, 1840 4 yrs.„ 7 mos.„ Ky. 162 Sept. 30, 1839 4 yrs.„ — D. C. 79 Nov. 30, 1840 3 yrs.„ 8 mos.„ Md. 104 3 yrs.„ — Phila. 129 Sept. 30, 1840 2 yrs.„ 5 mos.„ The difference between the average term of punishment in Connecticut and Philadelphia is 300 per cent! If the same result is effected by each, there has then been a great amount of gratuitous suffering in one case.
