176 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



other, they can not be governed by sentiment, be optimists or pes- 

 simists, or theorists of any sort. They must be governed by 

 principles. In the application of those principles they must be 

 guarded by facts ; and governments, unhappily, have no other 

 means of being informed of facts except by statistics. If figures 

 should happen to show that one in every four hundred citizens of 

 a given community is a law-breaker, and that this proportion had 

 not varied perceptibly in, say, twenty-five years, would that com- 

 munity be justified in erecting a system of public buildings for 

 the sake of experimenting toward a decrease of this percentage 

 buildings which must be paid for out of the pockets, not of the 

 law-breakers who pay no taxes, but of the law-observers who do ? 

 Possibly the tax-payers of the community would think not. 



Nothing, of course, should be allowed to antagonize the laws of 

 humanity, or, in a large sense, the laws of charity. But to whom 

 is charity to be shown ? Which class of the community deserves 

 the largest charity ? Is it Christian to expect the honest man, who 

 forever pays tithes of his toil, to experiment on the reformation of 

 the man whose ancestral traditions compel or incite him to toil 

 not, but to break in and help himself to the fruits of the honest 

 man's toil ? Let the largest charity be meted out to all. But no 

 charity can be meted out with equity, without some regard to de- 

 serts. It must not be forgotten, even by the charitable, that if 

 any preference is to be shown by the commonwealth, it is for 

 those who keep rather than those who break its statutes, and for 

 them that observe rather than for them that ignore the unwritten 

 laws that govern human relations. Ten minutes' inspection of 

 the haunts of crime in a city like New York, for example, ought 

 to convince the daintiest of bric-a-brac ladies and gentlemen of 

 the danger of a too well-appointed, a too substantially fed, and a 

 too well-libraried prison. The slums where the cold of winter al- 

 ternates only with the fetid and noxious odors of summer, would, 

 to most of us, destroy confidence at least in that homeliest of max- 

 ims, " If you don't like your jail, keep out of it." Certainly, the 

 more we strip the penitentiary of its penances, the more stress we 

 throw on the single element of disgrace to keep men out of jail. But 

 the disgrace of serving a term of imprisonment is a matter which, 

 unfortunately, partakes quite as largely of bric-a-brac as does the 

 sentiment of the average prison reformer. What disgrace is a 

 year or ten years in a prison to a nomad, a man from nowhere, 

 who has no character to lose, who goes by as many names as he 

 pleases and changes them as often as he likes ? The problem re- 

 mains. We must build prisons which, somehow or other, will be 

 less desirable abiding-places than the slums. We can not starve 

 prisoners, or turn them on wheels, or distort them with boots or 

 thumb-screws. We can not freeze them nor roast them, nor feed 



