APPENDIX. 363 



ment 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 at- 

 taining it. (The last is of great importance : we become indif- 

 ferent, 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 high- 

 est 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 labor by time to that of measuring time by labor 

 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 adversity for a 

 certain time, but until they can retrieve their position. They 

 suffer under this task ; they sorrow over it (but without resent- 

 ment) ; they struggle with it : their characters improve under the 

 various efforts and emotions called out by it ; (both deepened if 

 they have others to care for as well as themselves ;) frequently 

 they rise even higher than before; and society is instructed by 

 such examples in every way it shrinks from the preliminary 

 sufferings exhibited in them, and emulates, in due proportion as 

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

 overcome them. And so it might be with our punishments, if 

 we would model them on the same type. They are now for the 

 most part barbarous in every sense, in their want of skill and 

 adaptation to high purpose, and in the crime and misery they 

 thus gratuitously produce. We might make them beneficent in 



