i 7 4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



What have they to lose "by pilfering, assaulting, robbing, and 

 murdering ? So far as creature comforts are concerned, they live 

 better and work about as much, have warmer clothing and better 

 beds, in the meanest jail in the United States than they experience 

 out of it. So far as the duration of life is concerned, they will 

 probably live as long under a sentence of death as they do in the 

 wretched filth they pile up around them, and in the rapid changes 

 of our national weather. The bric-a-brac societies who have 

 exhausted Ibsen, Browning, and the entire science of photogra- 

 phy, and who are now devoting themselves to the comfort and 

 well-being of malefactors, might possibly be in good part, were 

 there any reasonable percentage of reformation in the ordinary 

 penitentiary experience ; if the enterprising burglar, after serv- 

 ing out his term, burglarized no more, or the cut-throat, released 

 from a long penalty for his crime as Mr. Gilbert would say 

 "loved to hear the little brook a-gurgling and to listen to the 

 merry village chime " ; but, as a matter of fact, he doesn't. But 

 here is a practical problem quite in the line of refinement. Sooner 

 or later, somebody in this country will be obliged to grapple with 

 the problem of the " dago." Can he be kept out of jail ? Can he 

 be made a useful citizen by utilizing the leisure he spends in jails 

 to educate him into some sort of comprehension of the new coun- 

 try in which he finds himself ? The proposition that every jail 

 and prison should be made reformatory as well as punitory in its 

 character would require, one would be apt to say, some little look- 

 ing into. The question as to whether states are bound to reform 

 as well as punish, their wrong-doers, depends largely upon the 

 wider question of the duties of a state to its citizens. The other 

 considerations, as to whether a state should make its prisoners 

 comfortable, should watch over their physical welfare, may be 

 disposed of at once by citing the general propositions that, how- 

 ever models of what they ought to be in other respects, our jails 

 ought to be somewhat more uncomfortable to the prisoner than 

 the most comfortless hovel that the poverty of the habitual 

 criminal provides ; as, otherwise, there would never be a class of 

 the community to whom a residence within prison walls would 

 not be a change for the better. Jail soup may be thin, but let the 

 man who loves not thin soup keep out of jail. And let the soup 

 be not thicker than, at least, the thinnest obtainable outside. 

 To reverse the old rhyme, in most cases "Stone walls should a 

 prison make, and iron bars a cage." If flowers are to be distrib- 

 uted by kind-hearted ladies at Easter, let it be to the deserving 

 who keep, rather than to the undeserving who keep not, the law 

 of the land. Of course, these propositions are not meant to con- 

 template the abnormal instances of squalor and filth, which com- 

 munities for their own preservation must treat with and rectify. 



