THE MARK SYSTEM. 191 



distressing cruelties, while the other has occasionally led to indulgences 

 scarcely less injurious in their ultimate consequences to both the crimi 

 nal and society, enfeebling the one, and leading the honest labourer, in 

 the other, painfully to contrast his own position with that of the con 

 victed felon. It will thus solve many preliminary difficulties, and con 

 duct to many important conclusions. It will give a new spirit to pun 

 ishment by giving it a new direction. By raising its object it will raise 

 its administration. It will be difficult to be either cruel or careless with 

 such an object as individual reform in view, and while wielding an agency 

 offering a reasonable probability of attaining it. (The last is of great 

 importance : we become indifferent, in spite of ourselves, when engaged 

 in a hopeless task.) It will assimilate this branch of our administration 

 to those ways of Providence to men which must always be our surest 

 guides when we seek to influence them. It will thus imitate the highest 

 wisdom, and thereby enable us to obey the highest precept. We may 

 love while we chasten, and be substantially kind even when enforcing 

 the strictest commands of punitive law. It will succeed with little effort, 

 because it will study the human nature implanted in us, instead of 

 trampling its impulses under foot. It will further conduct to great 

 economy as well as efficiency, partly through this cause, partly because 

 the virtues of industry and self-command which it will be its great aim 

 to foster will equally bring about both results. The practical change may 

 be thought a small one on which to found such anticipations the change 

 from measuring labour by time to that of measuring time by labour 

 or, in other words, from giving our criminals time-sentences to allotting 

 them tasks : but the one course is the direct reverse of the other, and 

 the difference may be thus the whole difference between right and 

 wrong, success and failure. It seems, indeed, even impossible to follow 

 out the chain of reasoning suggested without coming to this conclusion. 

 When men are smitten with adversity in ordinary life, and thus punished 

 for previous follies or misconduct,they are not condemned to this adrersity 

 for a certain fo we.but until they can retrieve their position. They suffer 

 under this task ; they sorrow over it (but without resentment) ; they strug 

 gle with it ; their characters improve under the various efforts and emo- . 

 tions called out by it, (both deepened if they have others to care for 

 as well as themselves ;) frequently they rise even higher than befofe ; 

 and society is instructed by such examples in everyway it shrinks from 

 the preliminary sufferings exhibited in them, and emulates, in due .pro 

 portion as its own case may require, the manly struggle that has at 



