72 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
Opiates are administered, to relieve pain, and all means known, to promote rapid 
and healthy repair, are resorted to, in order not only that he may be healed, but 
healed speedily, and with the least injury possible to the rest of the body. 
But cases do occur where a portion of the body has to be removed, in order 
to save the rest from deadly infection, as a mangled limb or cancerous breast, 
etc. No such exigency, however, can arise in the body politic. Complete segre- 
gation is always possible, without death. We feed the consumptive on a diet 
that experience has taught us restores the wasted tissues. The rheumatic or 
gouty are fed on agents that promote more complete breaking up of disintegrat- 
ing tissue, and again bring about a right state and composition of the blood. 
The dyspeptic has supplements for his wasted secretory organs, the tired man rest 
for his aching limbs. 
But the sickly or diseased morally, in the body politic, are, as soon as they 
go astray, thrust in a crowd, into a dungeon ; not only get no restoring agents for 
their sick morality, but are aggregated — mingled, in such a way — as to secure 
complete contamination of the whole mass of such beings. The novice in crime, 
with the most hardened criminal. What could be expected but that the novitiate will 
come out a thoroughly trained criminal. It is as if when a consumptive became 
ill, his friends should shut him up in a damp cellar, and feed him on the worst 
and most unwholesome food they could find for him. Nay more, expose him at 
the same time to the malign contagion of every other disease and thus expect to 
cure him. 
What would people say, if the large hospitals in any of our cities were con- 
ducted on such principles ? Would there not be a cry of indignation, from one 
end of the land to the other? But that is exactly what is being done for the 
morality of every prisoner who is sent to a prison, throughout all this enlightened 
land, despite its boasted culture, intelligence, and refinement. 
The statistics of crime come in here to verify my statements; showing from 
year to year an increase of crime despite the increase of learning. Man is not 
naturally vicious. It is a disturbing influence thrust into his nature. And, that 
like a deadly contagion spreads from individual to individual, and from commun- 
ity to community, and our prisons, in place of being moral hospitals, for the 
restoration to health of such, are nothing but pest-houses or, we might almost 
say, training-schools for criminals. Those persons have inherited strong pas- 
sions — which is always necessary for a strong morality. But crime comes in with 
its distorting hand, and no sooner touches the opening bud of human existence, 
than the flower changes from the rose of Sharon to Deadly Nightshade, and the 
fruit will be as apples of Sodom ripening only for bitterness, and death. 
Neither are all persons, arrested and imprisoned, criminals, even though they 
may have committed a breach of the law of the land. He only is a criminal who 
is a breaker of the law after mature deliberation. The man we now regard, and 
punish as the worst criminal — the murderer — is not always, nor indeed often, a 
premeditated criminal. More often than otherwise, he perpetrates this terrible 
crime in a passion, or on the impulse of the moment. He is thrust out of society 
