WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH THE "DAGO"? 175 



That question is disposed of by the Boards of Health, into whose 

 province it would seem naturally to come. 



Again, as to the duties owed by states to their citizens, two 

 things are, or ought to be, beyond question : first, that the state 

 should attempt the greatest good to the greatest number; and, 

 second, that it should not discriminate against the innocent in 

 favor of the wrong-doer. If, therefore, a state or community 

 building a jail, is unable to provide elaborately organized and 

 classified prisons to punish its wrong-doing citizens without tax- 

 ing its honest and law-abiding citizens unduly, it would not seem 

 to be its exact duty to do so. It should not impose unbearable or 

 irksome burdens upon its citizens who need no reformation, for 

 the purpose of experimenting upon those to whom reformation is 

 desirable. It is undesirable that a prison should be so constituted 

 or managed as to make its occupants, whether reformable or not, 

 worse than when they entered its portals ; but the tendency of 

 human nature to retrograde rather than improve, is, probably, 

 not less constant inside than outside of penitentiaries. So far as 

 this tendency of human nature to retrograde can be shown to be 

 largely enough re-enforced by non-classification of prisoners to 

 work actual harm to the state, some classification ought to be at- 

 tempted. 



To argue as some of us do, for example, that the public revenue 

 should be charged with the expense of building separate insti- 

 tutions for boys who, at ten years of age, have begun to burg- 

 larize, and for those who have begun to steal in broad daylight ; 

 to keep up with the legal difference between the two crimes ; or 

 that a further refinement of distinction should be made between 

 the man who has once and the one who has twice robbed ; or be- 

 tween the one who proposes on liberation to rob, and the one who 

 proposes on liberation not to rob again, is not only to be im- 

 practicable, but to become absurd. To a philosophic mind this 

 leads up to the doctrine of heredity, and the question whether the 

 criminal classes, from generation to generation, are not always 

 distinct, to about the same proportion, from the law-abiding class. 

 Whether the law-abiding, industrious, and honest classes should 

 be burdened with increased taxes to try and save the freshman 

 criminal from becoming a sophomore, and the junior from gradua- 

 tion into the senior class of crime, is a question much too pro- 

 found to be solved from any standpoint, especially from the stand- 

 point of the excellent gentlemen who make speeches to the philan- 

 thropical societies which speeches are referred to committees, 

 whose reports are printed in unlimited pamphlets ; still less from 

 the standpoint of the pamphlets themselves. 



So long as governments owe a duty to all classes of the com- 

 monwealth alike, and to no one over and above or as against an- 



