W fiESUHjW}^^1^' New Series. AUGUST, 1865. No. 2. J. P. ROBENS, PUBLISHER, 37 PARK ROW, And The American News Company. Philadelphia : W. B. Zieber, A. Winch. Boston : A. Williams & Co., J. J. Dyer & Co. Cairo, III. ; Memphis, Tenn. ; Mobile, Ala. ; and New Orleans, La. Blelock & Co. LONDON: SAMPSON, LOW, SON & CO., AND TEUBNEE: & CO. S^ S$fe HEAD LAST PAGE OF COVER. CONTENTS. Art. I. A PARTY OF THE FUTURE. A. J. H. Duganne, .... 97 II. THE HEALTH QUESTION. A. J. H. Duganne,.....104 III. OUR STATE PRISON SYSTEM. A. B.,......113 IV. PAUL GRANGER'S CHOICE. Sybil Rose,......120 V. THE EPITAPH ON BION. From the Greek or Moschus, . . .128 VI. SHADOWS OF MANHATTAN. "Old Nick," . .... 130 VII. MANUSCRIPT OF THE QUEEN'S COURT. From the Bohemian, . 133 VIII. SAVED BY ANGELS. Augustus Fontaine,......140 IX. FRIENDS OF AMERICA IN ENGLAND. Eboracus, . . . .146 X. ILDEGERTE. From the German of Kotzebue,.....Io0 XI. SOCIETY FOR THE DIFFUSION OF POLITICAL KNOWLEDGE, . . 161 XII. THE FLAG,............162 XIII. FOUND WANTING. Frances M. Bennett,......163 XIV. "L. N.," MR. SEWARD AND FINANCE. Jacques Bonhomme. . . 173 XV. PROVINGS OF CURRENT THEORIES IN SCIENCE, ... 176 XVI. THE WILLOW AND THE SOUL. Carlos Max,.....180 XVII. LITERARY RECORD,..........181 Lessons from the World of Matter and the World of Mind—Library of Old English Divines—The Condition and Prospects of the South—Systematic Human Physiology, Anatomy and Hygiene—Our Great Captains—Hasty Re- cognition of Rebel Belligerency—The Conversion of the Roman Empire— The House of Elmore ; A Family History—Grandmother's Money—Wild- flowers_One and Twenty—Akrah-ua-Pogue; or the Wicklow Wedding— The Martyr's Monumtnt—Amendments to the Constitution—The Fortnightly Review_Raymond's Life of Lincoln—Taxation—New Music. EDITOR'S TABLE.............186 Town and Country—Genius—Coslebs—Through the Shadows—Literary J Fame vs. Political Office—Travelling Abroad. « KaTEKED, according to Act of Congress, In the year Itjiij, by J. Holmes AOn,:\v, n: ihe Uerk's olUee of ihe D.s.r.c Court of tli-j United Suites for the Southern District of Nnv York. 1865.] A Party of the Future. 103 ing to derive power from an insurrec- tionary mob—even though that mob might pretend to be the majority'? But it is objected that the Fcederal Government, by presidential procla- mations and congressional action, has admitted an abrogation of the State constitution of Louisiana, in allowing a re-construction of State government under a new constitution submitted to and adopted by a tenth of the loyal voters of Louisiana. It is also held, or may be held, that Congress recog- nized an abrogation de facto of the State constitution of Virginia, and tes- tified its recognition of that fact by constructing a new State out of Vir- ginia territory set apart for the pur- pose. But, in the case of Louisiana, it is understood that the voters, who took part in the election of a loyal legisla- ture, were acknowledged to be legal vo- ters of the State, acting under the pre- scribed forms of the Louisiana State constitution—which had never ceased ''■fc^- to be operative. It matters not, there- fore, whether these loyal voters con- stituted one-tenth or nine-tenths of all the persons entitled to vote; be- cause, if the non-voters took no part in the election, it was clearly through their own laches or default, and the ! actual voters thereby became rightfully the law-making power of the State. And as regards the peculiar features of this Louisiana election—as differing k from previous ones—we must recognize that Congress possessed the right un- der the Fcederal Constitution, and " at any time, by law," to "make or alter (State) regulations " prescribing " the times, places, and manner of holding elections for senators and representa- tives," at least, if not for local State officials. But, in the matter of erecting the State of Western Virginia, was Con- gress also mindful of the constitution- al inhibition (Art. iv. Sec. 1,) that "no new State shall be formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other State " " without the consent of the legislature of the State concerned 1n We answer that, by and under our view of the unceasing sovereignty of the State constitution of Virginia over her internal affairs, Congress was en- abled to act, and did act, in strict ac- cordance with the above-quoted con- stitutional provision. It is true that the voters of West Virginia only (act- ing through their delegates legislative- ly assembled) took part in the act of erecting that portion of the " Old Dominion " into a new State. But, it must be recollected that the voters of West Virginia, at that time—exercis- ing their right of suffrage under the old State constitution which had nev- er been legally abrogated—did con- stitute de facto the legal as well as loyal voters of the entire State. Eastern Virginia had outlawed itself by illegal secession, and the masses of its voters, in disabling themselves from taking part in a vote upon the ques- tion of State division, clearly permit- ted the voters of Western Virginia to decide the result at the ballot-box. Consequently, as in the case of Louis- iana, it was the laches and default of rebellious and self-disfranchised men, which yielded the legal rule of Virgin- ia, under her constitution, into the hands of a minority of voters who had remained faithful to that constitution, and had refused to disfranchise them- selves. The acts of State government and sovereignty actually performed by minorities in Louisiana and Virginia, unite to prove the existence of an unabrogated constitution in every rebel State, and to demonstrate the sound- ness of President Johnson's position in reference to the unbroken validity of State constitutions during, and not- withstanding, the stress of rebellious forces against them. " Inter arma silent leges." But though laws and constitutions were dumb under duress THE FCEDERAL AMERICAN. fflree in, Opinion,. . . . JMeraZ in, discussion,. ^ VOL. LXVI.—AUGUST, 1865—NO. II. (oQ_________________ V THE HEALTH QUESTION. From the body of evidence produced by the labors of skilled physicians, acting as medical inspectors for the Citizens' Association, and from a mass of testimony arrayed during the last session before Legislative Committees, the public must have become familiar with the sanitary wants of our city. They have learned that numberless abodes of human beings in our midst are the nurseries of disease, as well as the centers of misery. They know that we have alleys, squares and streets, in which sickness is ever pres- ent ; that there are dwellings which can be fitly described only by the suggestive title of " fever-nests j" and that there is a process of moral and physical decay among our poorer pop- ulation which can only be classified as " tenant-house rot." Facts of the most stubborn kind demonstrate the existence in our community of barbar- ism which shames civilization, and of degradation that accuses Christianity. We have learned that our preventable deaths are numbered by tens of thou- sands ; that fevers have become en- demics within a hundred precincts; that multitudes are poisoned by putrid effluvia; that squalor, filth, and physi- cal sufferings are the daily concom- itants of half our social life. Medical theorists may dispute as to the contagious principle of our com- mon low nervous and bilious fevers. We need not enter into entangling discussions regarding the comparative prevalence of typhus, synochus, or other more arbitrary distinctions of febris. It is enough to realize that, in numberless blocks of houses in New York City, we can trace a death-trail of something—call it by whatever name you please—which prostrates as quickly, and overcomes as surely, as any malignant type of spotted pesti- lence. Passing from individual to in- dividual, from apartment to apart- ment ; alternately afflicting every member of a family, and every family residing under the same roof; we can identify its characteristics, whether we classify it or not. We shall never fail to remark its appearance where circumstances lead to its introduction ; and we must inevitably chronicle its establishment wherever those circum- stances concur to afford it proper nidus and support. It is observed by natu- ralists that, where all things tend to the disclosure and sustenance of any production, in that place—no matter how the germen may be conveyed—we are sure to find developed the peculiar species, which, by habit and sympa- thy, accords with the local surround- ings. The same, undoubtedly, is true 1865.] The Health Question. 105 of disease. If abject poverty, scanty food and clothing, filthy habitation, dejection of mind, and debility of body, be latent causes that engender contagious or infectious diseases in one district, we may be certain that " like will beget like" in other districts, however remote. It is sufficiently frightful to contem- plate the ravages of a pestilence from some safe scientific stand-point of ob- servation. It becomes more alarming when the visitation depopulates a neighborhood of ours; and when the death-rates of a city in which we re- side reveal the presence of fatal infec- tion every side of us. But what will the community, as yet unawakened to peril, reply to our assertion, based on medical statistics, that fevers compar- atively light among the poorer classes, wax to malignant fatality when intro- duced to the quarters of luxury and refinement ? Typhus, for instance, comparatively mild in its attacks upon the lower strata of society, becomes virulent when transferred to the man- sions of wealth and apparent exclusive- ness. Originating in the same specific contagion, and developed through the same malarious influences, as an en- demic, it no sooner becomes liberated upon the wings of ammonia, than it assumes directly a mortal character, changing, as it were, its very essence, as it passes from poor to rich. Among the habitants of gregarious localities, abandoned to filth and neglect, and be- coming actual purveyors of disease, the mortality in cases of fever will be found to average less than one in thirty; but among the affluent and comfortable the deaths are as one to five cases. So, then, the chances to survive, attacked by typhus or other local fever—apart from putrid hospital types—are against our " better classes " in the proportion of six to one, as compared with the poorer. A poor denizen of the crowd- ed tenant-house, attacked by low ty- phus in his dark abode, may be pros- trated, and speedily recover; while the dweller in Madison Square, after succumbing to sequent symptoms of stupor, headache, convulsions, muscu- lar contractions, and deliriums, may perish miserably, at last, under the true, malignant t}rphus. The labors of Hercules, as recited in classic story, were types, it has been said, of successive reforms or amelior- ations introduced by wise monarchs into ancient society. However that may be, it is certain that we have in modern communities the equivalents of many such monsters as were des- troyed by Alcmena's son. Not to apply the threadbare simile of Augean stable to New York streets, we may aptly liken the tenant-house nuisance to that other imbodiment of malarious poison which the strong man encoun- in Lernean morasses. We have, in fact, a domestic Lernean marsh in the filthy and feculent " back-slums " of our city, and a local hydra in the many-headed evils of that horrible excrescence—the tenant-house. To recognize this abominable pack- ing-box arrangement as a dwelling- system for human beings is to scan- dalize civilization. To declare it a " laboratory of poisons "—whose em- anations vitiate health and morals— whose agencies corrupt body and soul —is to utter only simple truth. To assert that its endemic influences add forty per cent to our bills of mortality, sixty per cent, to our pauperism, seventy per cent, to our local crime, would be tout the iteration of truisms. To describe it as a gangrene of the social membrane, as a " goitre " (so to speak) upon our community's body, would be but a suggestion of superficial venom and hideousness. For our tenant-house cancer is not merely protrusive; in fact, it does not pro- trude enough, therefore we lose sight of it; but it is a polypus, secretly and 106 The Health constantly renewing its virus—fatally expansive for mischief, and accretive of all mischievous elements. " It doth make the meat it feeds on." We do not propose to deal rhetoric- ally with our tenant-house, its incu- bations, or its progenies. Here it is, in our midst; quite equal to the task of telling its own story eloquently, in mortality bills, crime dockets, and the records of pauperism. We are content to marshal facts and array statistics; letting them fight their own battle agajnst prejudice or indifference. Be- ginning at the social base, we encounter twenty-three thousand dwellers in cellars, six feet or more underground; cellars that are not simply dark, impure abodes, but clammy, moldy, obscene abysses, invaded periodically by tide-water, or submerged by drain- age of the soil. Life rots in them. Seventy per cent, of children born in their gloom perish within five years ; many of the residue survive only as victims to future typhoid, rheumatism, hip, or bowel affections. These cellar- born children have pallid skins, rickety limbs, watery blood. Hygrometric scrutiny of the holes they inhabit shows a condition of atmosphere ac- tively destructive by night and by day. Day, indeed, with its air-currents and sunshine, is unknown to our city troglodytes. Crawling out of their burrows, into narrow lanes or wells, close-pent by high walls, they may catch occasional glimpses of the blue sky, just as the cretins and cagots of sunless Alpine chasms may get sight of a heaven far above them. Indeed, our cellar-dwellers have much in com- mon with the cretins. They are not yet afflicted with goitre or elephanti- asis; they do not, as yet, transmit leprosy and idiocy; but they exhibit the incipient effects of the same desti- tution of sunlight and proper air which engenders cretinism and its revolting monstrosities. How long before we Question. [August* shall behold elephantiasis thrusting its horrid features from the rags of our beggars may be suggested by com- paring the progress of such diseases in South American and East Indian cit- ies, where chronic filth and malaria have made them hereditary endemics. Darkness, moisture, and squalor in our subterrene tenements are con- stantly operative; producing cachexy, or scrofula, rickets, opthalmia and erysipelas. We need no subtler agent of disease than darkness alone. All foul or loathsome forms of life or decay multiply under its curtain. Where heaven's sunbeams enter not, health cannot survive. Epidemics are sure to fasten, with deadliest gripe, on the inhabitants of dark, close localities. The sunny side of a street has been known to escape a pestilential visita- tion which decimated the population opposite. As we find the Negro and Indian drinking strength from the solar rays which they delight to bask in, so surely may we discover our cellar-dwellers emasculated by the dank and putrid emanations of their living tombs. A traveller visiting Lyons, in France, will notice long lines of stumps bor- dering on the river—remains of giant trees, which formerly adorned the landscape. Their naked, blasted ap- pearance might indicate the locality of a great conflagration, or the scene of conflict during war. But on inquiry, it is found that the fumes of a neigh- boring vitriol factory have silently, stealthily, but with deadly influence, destroyed the grand forest trees, as effectually as if a cannonade had lev- elled them to the ground. We know that in nearly every popu- lous neighborhood within the limits of New York city, there exist fac- tories of poison more malignant than the fumes of vitriol; and their tend- ency, nay, their constant effect, is to dwarf, stunt, and kill—not trees__but 1865.] The Health Question. 107 human beings. More actively des- tructive than the Lyons laboratory— and operating every hour of day and night—the poison factories of New York city attack the health, corrupt the habits, and shorten the life of our population. In many localities it appears as if no supervision were ever contemplated. Entire squares seem to be given over to the dominion of dirt. " Fever- nests," where typhoid infection is bred by miasmatic sewers, and " small-pox circles," where loathsome contagion riots on foul house gases and decom- posed garbage, horrify the explorer in all quarters. A single physician has attended one hundred and fifty-four cases of typhus fever, and sixty-two cases of small-pox, in his tenement- house rounds during less than six months. Ninety thousand cases of small-pox are estimated to have occur- red during forty years; all engendered by filth. Not less than nine or ten thousand human lives are sacrificed annually to a neglect of municipal san- itary regulations. Filth destroys each year ten thousand men, women, and children in our city, as surely as vit- riol killed those trees in Lyons. Thirty per cent, of our whole mortality rises from preventible disease. Thirty persons are slain daily in our midst, by guerrilla-shots from pickets of death, lurking about us in malaria, miasma, dirt, and dampness. How can we ex- pect to escape camp and prison disor- ders, when six hundred thousand peo- ple are packed in less than fifteen thousand tenant-houses, and ^ nearly twenty-four thousand burrow under- ground in cellars? What army,jeven in an open country, and well fed, would not be ravaged by disease, under such conditions 1 But we have numberless aggravations of the packing process. All descriptions of noxious surround- ings besiege our tenant-house popula- tion. They are located like prisoners encamped in Southern swamps, with- out power to escape from the plagues which beset them. Three hundred slaughter houses, fat-boiling concerns, and similar nuisances, are scattered through our populous neighborhoods. Vegetable decay, animal putrefaction, quite as deleterious as swamp exhala- tions, are heaped before every door through miles of our streets and back- areas. There are no vigilant camp po- lice to remove them ; no officer of the day responsible for their extirpation. As Mr. Carr, late Superintendent of Sanitary Inspection in the City Inspec- tor's Department, says, " We have no Sanitary Department in the city at all commensurate with what the name implies." " For the last six months not a sanitary measure has received attention." " It had been as well if no Sanitary Department were in exis- tence." We are, with good reason, alarmed at the occasional encroachments upon local health and comfort by the erec- tion of chemical works, furnaces, glue- factories, and kindred nuisances near our private dwellings. We feel pro- perly aggrieved when one of the two hundred and twenty-three slaughter- houses distributed through densely populated neighborhoods casts forth its noisome stenches " betwixt the wind and our nobility." We can trace a fatal connection between the slow fever which robbed us of a darling child or a dear wife, and that sickening efflu- vium of which our beloved one had so often complained, as invading the win- dows. We have a right to complain of the official neglect which allows compost-grounds and dumping-places to be permanently located within a few hundred yards of our decent and respectable squares. But, though all these nuisances are intolerable, and, in their measure, deadly foes to public health, they cannot be compared, for a moment, with the incessantly-active, 108 The Health Question. [August, ever-malignant forces of death that are ejected constantly from those " la- boratories of poison," the tenant- houses. Not isolated, like factories, but agglomerated by blocks in every district, these building-anomalies not only compress, torture, and murder their wretched inmates, but actually have power to make those inmates the involuntary murderers of their innocent fellow-citizens who dwell elsewhere. Through the potent chemistry of stag- nant air, darkness, damp, and filth, these terrible structures are able to create miasmatic poisons that belea- guer both the daily and nightly exis- tence of their unhappy occupants. Entering every pore, fastening on every sense, clinging to every tissue, these tenant-house poisons, thus chemically combined, become prolific agents of disease; developing whatsoever mor- bific germs may already lurk in the hu- man system. The germs, in their turn, become a portion of the local poison. Disease multiplies its agencies. Cor- ruption, decay, mortality give out their atoms. All these forces, concentrating under tenant-house roofs, working la- tently within the precincts of narrow cells, which the sun enters not, where the air cannot circulate; constituting, in their combination, a battery of sub- tile gases; does it require a scientific disquisition to demonstrate what must be their natural effects upon all sur- roundings 1 Let our death-rates, our local epidemics, our chronic diseases answer. It is a fact, pregnant with interest at the present time, that long and bloody national conflicts are usually precursors of virulent and fatal visita- tions of disease. Epidemics encamp behind armies. Pestilence is the rear- guard of war. In the pages of Thu- c}rdides we find harrowing pictures of that dread infection which clung to the skirts of Athens during her Pelo- ponnesian War, fulfilling the oracular prediction that " A Doric war shall fall, And a great plague withal." Calvisius writes in Latin of a terri- ble plague that scourged the Roman world for fifteen years, about the pe- riod when Gallus reigned; a period marked by savage intestinal conflicts, resulting in the elevation, successively, of fifty usurpers to the imperial throne. Still later, Procopius describes a pes- tilential visitation which traversed the Eastern Empire, just after the Persian War of Justinian, and the ^ sanguinary popular quarrels of Red and Green factions in Byzantium—an epidemic so fatal that ten thousand deaths are reported to have occurred daily in Constantinople alone. Fol- lowing the Roman invasion of Britain, a plague broke out, in Vortigern's reign, of so fierce a type as to sweep off more victims than the survivors could bury. In 1347 began the " six- year plague "—known through the pages of Boccacio as the " Plague of '*- Florence "—which " so wasted Eu- rope," says Calvisius, "that not the third part of men were left alive." One church-yard alone, in London, received more than fifty thousand bodies in twelve months of the dis- ease. Boccacio ascribes its origin to India; but, like other epidemics, we find it following a previous great conflict. Bloody civil wars in France and Italy, a fierce struggle in Flanders, the battle of Crecy, the siege of Calais, were all immediate forerunners of the great plague. And nearly two centu- ries after this, in the middle of the Thirty-years' War, another plague arose. Still another succeeded the wars of the Fronde, in France. Then came the great plague of 1664, when there perished, in London and its par- ishes, 68,000 between April and Octo- ber. This awful infliction followed the English civil war, which had been ended by the Restoration. 1865.] The Health Question. 109 And the cholera! how closely its shrouded form glided after revolution! how its ghastly death-dance attended the red carnival of war! Its birth may have been Asiatic, but its funeral foot-prints traced the map of European battle-fields—from Jemappes to Mos- cow. Are these facts only curious coincidences, or is there an appalling connection between war and pesti- lence ? Is there a mysterious lex tali- onis in Nature, revisiting on man the plagues which he inflicts upon earth through his bloody contentions ? Are battle-plains, with their reeking dead, hospitals, with their fecund exhala- tions, camps, and their contagions, so many voltaic piles, charged with the subtle fluid of latent pestilence ? Do wasted fields, abandoned of husbandry, nurse the germs of a future corrup- tion, which floods shall liberate and winds disseminate broadcast over the land 1 We care not to speculate con- cerning agencies like these; but if they ♦ exist, are we secure against the innocu- lation of their deadly principle 7 It is an inquiry fraught with vital significance. At this very hour, the " cloud no bigger than a man's hand" may be densifying over some aceldama of carnage, or some fever den of the war ; the cloud which, imbosonmig ma- larious infection, shall hereafter launch its viewless bolts into the reservoirs of carbonic-acid gas ; the storehouses of sulphureted hydrogen; the inaga- » zines of putrescent exuviae, that, in our crowded cities, await but a com- municating virus, to become death- dealing batteries of pestilence. Have we not, then, a somewhat vital interest in the consideration of dis- ease, in its aspect as a sequence of war ? Here—at the commercial gate of the nation, a point to which con- verge the most diverse business high- ways, and from which radiate the most extended lines of human intercourse— here must pestilence, should it arise, find pivot and fulcrum. We have built up here our warehouses, and piled them with flour and meats ; but we have here, likewise, constructed our tenant-houses, and stored them with pabulum for death. We fill our public squares with gay equipages, and our walks with refined and brilliant strangers and citizens ; but we crowd our narrow lanes and hidden courts with diseased, stifled,and stunted out- casts. We allot fifty streets to our magnificent Central Park; but we compress more than half-a-million of our population into a limit of earth- space hardly sufficient to allow each individual the breadth and length of a grave. We appropriate miles of mar- ble and brown-stone palaces to luxuri- ous occupancy, in the ratio of a dozen sumptuous salons to a single person ; but we confine twenty-three thousand souls under ground in cellars, and we pack four hundred and fifty thousand in ten thousand houses, obliging them to dwell in airless dens and sunless cells, there to sin, there to suffer, there to rot, and there to die, unregarded. In the city of York (England), the cholera of 1832 broke out in a crowd- ed court, known as the " Hagworm's Nest." In that locality raged the plague of 1664. In the same court first appeared the pestilence of 1551. During nearly three centuries, that horrid "Nest" had kept intact its eggs of pest. Generation after gener- ation dwelt around it, heedlessly, as we dwell around our "fever-nests " of New York city. In following the track of pestilence through different climes and ages, we encounter coincidences which establish the fact that epidemics have an affinity for endemics; or, rather, that the former usurp the dominion of the lat- ter, claiming the localities wherein they flourished, and the subjects which they swayed. Thus, in the passage of the great plague of 1346 over Europe 110 The Health Question. [August, and in subsequent visitations of simi- lar diseases, the small town of Aigne Morte, in Languedoc, was repeatedly made a centre, or point d'appui, whence the distemper radiated to surround- ing districts. This town has always been noted for its local disorders, aris- ing from the malaria which overhangs, and the stagnant water that encom- passes it. Milan and the healthful mountain ranges were notably as ex- empt from this plague as the coasts and marsh-lands of Italy were ravaged by it. And, as in plague, so in cholera and typhus, the crowded purlieus of great cities have ever been the seats of infection. When low fevers and their concomi- tants become naturalized in certain localities, they serve as nuclei for the sporadic propagation of kindred dis- eases, whenever season and material combine to feed it. The distinctive type of the endemic may merge and be lost in its more virulent successor, but it will have performed its mission ; it will have absorbed and given out the principle of poison which constitutes its affinity with plague or cholera. " It appears," says Dr. Southwood Smith, of London, " that in many parts of Bethnal Green and White Chapel fever of a malignant and fatal charac- ter is always more or less prevalent. In some streets it has prevailed in al- most every house; in some courts, in every house ; and in some few instan- ces, in every room in every house. Cases are recorded in which every member of a family has been attacked in succession, of whom, in every such case, several have died. Some whole families have been swept away. Six persons have been found lying ill of fever in one small room." Here we have the point d'appui of a pestilence movement. It was said that early plagues might be traced to fetid exhalations from dead locusts ; nd Dr. Smith, above quoted; says that " the room of a fever-patient in a small, heated apartment in London, with no perflation of fresh air, is per- fectly analagous to a standing pool in Ethiopia full of bodies of dead locusts. The poison generated in both cases is the same; the difference is merely in the degree of its potency. Nature, with her burning sun, her stilled and pent-up wind, her stagnant and teem- ing marsh, manufactures plague on a large and fearful scale. Poverty, in her hut, covered with rags, surrounded with her filth, striving with all her might to keep out the pure air and to increase the heat, imitates nature but too successfully ; the process and the product are the same ; the only dif- ference is in the magnitude of re- sults." To this testimony, a hundred au- thorities add weight. Another Eng- lish medical man says that he has en- countered localities from which fever is seldom absent. " We find spots where spasmodic cholera located itself are also the chosen resorts of contin- ued fever." " In damp, dark, and chilly cellars," says Dr. Griscom, of our city, " fevers, rheumatism, conta- gious and inflammatory disorders, af- fections of the lungs, skin, and eyes, too often successfully combat the skill of the physicians." Again, he says: " The degraded habits of life, the de- generate morals, the confined and crowded apartments, and insufficient food, of those who live in more ele- vated rooms, comparatively beyond the reach of the exhalations of the soil, engender a different train of diseases, sufficiently distressing to contemplate ; but the addition to all these causes of the foul influence of the incessant moisture and more confined air of un- derground rooms, is productive of evils which humanity cannot regard without shuddering." Now, the death-rate in New York City has increased since 1810 from 1 1865.] The Health Question. Ill in 46£ to 1 in 35. To every death, in a populous district like Manhattan Island, there will be about thirty cases of sickness. This gives an an- nual rate of between two and three hundred thousand sick cases; more than a quarter of our entire popula- tion. Paris is healthier than New York. If we reduce our death-rate to that of the French capital, we shall save four hundred thousand lives an- nually ; reduce it to the average of London, and we shall save more than nine thousand human lives each year. This is the calculation under ordinary circumstances. But how would our " fever-nests " and "cholera-holes " be quarantined should the " pestilence that walketh at noon-day" fling his yellow shadow over this great metrop- olis 1 What charmed circle around the " tenant-house" neighborhood shall taboo its deadly gases, its subtle infections, from contact with the pal- aces of luxury 1 Here, under our nostrils, the virus of small-pox continually eats into so- ciety. More than ten thousand per- sons have died of this disease in our city during forty years, and more than one hundred thousand persons have been attacked by it. It is at this time fearfully on the increase, and its dreadful emanations daily penetrate to the rural districts. They cling to cars and steamboats ; they are dispensed through personal contagion ; they lie- in-wait among second-hand garments sold in our slop-shops ; they nestle in bed-clothes so plenty after periodical clearances of hospitals. But small- pox is only one of the myriad agencies of death in our midst. Now, it is better for us, as Christian men and good citizens, to hear sober truth occasionally, though it be unpal- atable, than to listen always to "the voice of the charmer, charm he ever so wisely." We may ignore the fact of there being latent and horrible evils in our midst, or we may, for a season, shirk our responsibility regarding them; but, sooner or later, we shall invoke, aDd must abide, the conse- quences of their protracted existence. There is an oriental story, which re- lates that a certain tyrant used to clothe his fierce soldiers in the skins of tigers, wolves, and other wild beasts, and set them to hunting poor people out of their beds at night, and driving them into the highways and fields, to worry and tear them, while the old king rode behind, enjoying the sport. But in punishment of this cru- elty, as the legend runs, the disguised soldiers were suddenly changed into real wild beasts, and made to turn on the wicked monarch himself, who per- ished miserably under their teeth and claws. We are pursuing a like atro- cious chase in the city of New York at this day; hunting not only the bodies but the souls of human beings out of the pale of comfort, repose, and decency, to the highways of pauperism and the commons of crimes. We are making practical the oriental legend, in our heathen neglect of the rights, claims, and * sore necessities of four hundred thousand of the poor inhabi- tants of this mighty emporium of Traffic. Traffic, did we say 1 And must we repeat that it is Traffic, and Traffic only, which has become rule and guage for our action as members of a great community 1 We traffic not only in silks,and cloths, and jewels, and spices, but in the health, honor, and life of men, women, and children. We traf- fic not only in bricks and mortar, but in the light of heaven, the sweetness of air, and the purity of earth. We huxter the free sunshine, doling it to human cravings as grudgingly as mi- sers dole out their gold. We compute the minimum of air and space where- in mortal existence may linger, and make our calculation the basis for 112 The Health Question. [August, money-making out of mortal suffering. All this we do in a spirit of traffic which invests its lucre, not in the broad, noble fields of mercantile ad- venture, that builds up States and plants colonies, but in a narrow, muck- worm track of speculation, wh-erefrom arise those cells and dens of mason- work that brood over our filthy streets and foul alleys like unclean buzzards over some loathsome lazar-yard. With our billions of eager capital— that fulcrum on which the lever of en- terprise, rightly adjusted, can move the world—we exhibit no commensu- rate expansion of generous public spir- it such as made the Medici of Florence princes as well as merchants, and the Van Horns and Egmonts of Holland sovereigns as well as traders. We emulate not those grand old traffickers of Tyre, who reared colossal cities whenever they halted their caravans or anchored their galleys; cities whose very ruins astonish the beholder ; but we rather imitate the grovelling Egyp- tians, who worshipped that creeping thing, the beetle, which ever toils to accumulate a muck-ball, to roll before it, as its wealth. Hence, we never ask if there be relationships connect- ing spacious streets with public health, or if there be affinities between decent homes and popular morals. We are satisfied to roll up our individual muck- balls to the proportions of marble ware- houses and brown stone mansions, and are equally content to let other human scarabei enlarge their own filthy piles to the bulk of tenant-houses filled with all uncleanness. So, then, our gorgeous marts, our splendid churches, our stately public edifices, tower above brilliant thoroughfares, while leagues of shipping line our piers, and untold treasures are borne, as on triumphal cars, over the iron roads of our com- mercial prosperity. But, all the while, we have mildew at the heart, consum- ing flame under regal garments, a " carrion death " in the golden casket of our seeming. Under Paris and Rome are cata- combs, where the debris of mortality was allowed to accumulate for ages, and where, at different epochs, bands of thieves and outlaws sought hiding- places, and thence emerged to plunder and kill the inhabitants above. Happily, in our day, science and progress have converted these subterranean crypts in- to viaducts for sewer-drains, gas and water-pipes. The ancient golgothas are now become media of benefits to society, instead of remaining vaults of corrup- tion, sheltering disease and crime. We New Yorkers, also, have our cata- combs, not underground, but on the surface of Manhattan Island, as dis- tinct and loathsome as were the old tombs beneath Seine and Tiber. Our back-streets, alleys, and confined areas, over-populated with decaying humanity, and fecund with all foul things bred from slime and malaria, are nothing more or less than social -y graveyards in our midst, harboring death and sheltering evils that are actually worse than death. We can- not den}r this. Facts are palpable. Figures will not lie. It needs but a short turn from civilized Broadway to stumble upon barbarous and savage districts, given over to society's deadly enemies—squalor and reckless poverty. Is it not time to do something with our catacombs ? If capital can erect its miles of massive store-houses and ^ palaces, can it not build, likewise, miles of renovated, comfortable, christianized dwellings for the people who bear all social and political burthens—that mighty mass who are the substructure of our city, our state, and our re- public ? If capital can call navies, and armies, and governments, and colonies into being, can it not also create homes? The field is broad in our city. A million of people are inter- ested directly in the result. 1865.] Our State Prison System. 113 OUR STATE PRISON SYSTEM.* The traveller, westward bound, on entering that beautiful miniature city, formerly the " Loveliest village of the plain," finds his attention arrested by cold, gray limestone walls, softened some- what by the red sandstone belts, the coping of the turrets, the quoins, and surroundings of the black, iron-grated windows, of the Auburn State Prison. Surmounting the cupola he sees the ef- figy of a soldier on guard, and the toc- sin in full view beneath his feet. By this time the cars have halted within the railway station, whence, after the lapse of a few minutes, at the twain blast of the locomotive they will emerge running along, not far from the prison, presenting another view of its gray walls and grim windows. In its western enclosure may be seen the un- attractive rear of the new State Asy- lum for insane convicts. As a philopenist, a lover of punish- ment to evil doers, it may not be out of place, partly for information and partly as warning, to present a rough sketch of this extensive institution- The main edifice stretches round three sides of a square, and consists of a front central portion, three stories high, with two two-story wings having deep extensions ; the whole standing on a high basement. The extensions are interrupted midway by central sec- tions rising one story higher, so that the three sides, with the exception of the cupolas, present the same general appearance. This, the original archi- * Seventeenth Annual Report of the In- spectors of State Prisons of the State of New York. January 31, A. D. 1865. Senate Document No. 30, and other Leg- islative documents and reports pertaining thereto. vol. lxvi. 8 tectural design, has lately been modi- fied by a continuation of the south wing to the outer wall on that side. The central front building is occupied by the Warden and Agent as a resi- dence, excepting, however, offices for himself, the clerk and State Inspectors. In the basement of the south wing, the kitchen and mess-room are located which, with the chapel in the second and the hospital in the upper story, occupy about one-half its capacity. The remainder, and the entire north wing, contain the cells, and are the great dormitories of the prison. The building measures in front three hun- dred and eighty-eight feet, and is two hundred and sixty-six feet deep. The dormitories consist of blocks of cells five tiers high, reached by galleries from corridors, which surround the en- tire block. These corridors are light- ed by large grated windows fronting the cells. The cells, nine hundred and ninety-two in number, exclusive of the dungeons, receive their light and air from the corridors through grated doors. The dormitories are nearly fire-proof, being composed of stone and iron, having only the narrov^ gallery floors laid with wood. The new cells are seven feet by three feet and four inches on the floor, and seven feet and six inches high. An iron turn-up, sack-bottom bedstead and bedding; a Bible with three or four additional books and a night-tub, comprise their furniture. In the rear of the main building are several extensive work- shops, built mostly of brick, generally two stories high, but with no greater strength of construction than ordinary buildings for mechanical purposes. To render the surveillance complete, one side of each working apartment was formerly provided with a dark avenue 114 Our State Prison System. [August, from which, through horizontal crev- ices, an unobserved view of both keep- ers and convicts could be obtained. But this right arm of the discipline has recently been abolished. The whole is surrounded by a wall from three to four feet thick, measuring five hundred feet front by fifteen hundred deep, enclosing about seventeen super- ficial acres. This area is divided by the building and cross-walls into front, centre and garden yards. The height of the front yard wall is fifteen feet, having a main entrance and two side gates. That <>f the centre yard, sur- rounding the workshops, is thirty feet, and of the garden, the locality of the new asylum, twelve feet. The wall is furnished with a hand-rail and sen- try-boxes, for the protection of the in- fantry-armed sentinels. The general appearance of the prison is cold and repulsive, rendered peculiarly so by the material used in its construction, but does not strike the spectator on first beholding it with the heavy gloom that pervades the Eastern Penitentiary of Pennsylvania; and the feelings usually associated with a great prison are soon lost in the manifestations of life and activity. Should the traveller chance to halt in his pursuit of health, of pleasure or of wealth, and take an internal look at this earthly pandemonium, he may, by possibility, go on convinced, like a wise Assembly committee, who, after "taking testimony" in regard to grave charges upon its officers, ["made a rigid examination into the condition of the Prison, the manner in which its affairs are conducted; * * * also a thorough examination of the Asylum building, so far as it had progressed ; and exam- ined the accounts of moneys" (about forty thousand dollars,) "expended upon it,"] were, upon an investigation, embracing a period of less than twelve hours, into the most subtle, the most complicated of human institutions, con- tent to report " that the present sys- tem of inspection and management is a good and valuable one, and requires no change at the hands of the Legisla- ture." (Assembly Doc. 143—A. D. 1858.) But the Auburn Prison, which proposes to prevent as well as punish crime—involving social power, and in- dividual liability—is too far-reaching to be comprehended by the curious in a casual visit, or analyzed bjr partial or incompetent committees of investiga- tion. The Auburn Prison, being the en- sample of those at Sing Sing and Clin- ton, will in these remarks be the chief object; while the latter, conducted on like principles and with similar results, are introduced in elucidation of the subject generally. Social security and retributive jus- tice are primary ideas imbodied in in- carceration for crime. Self-support and convict reformation are modern additions to ancient practices. The original ideas, with their late affixes, ostensibly embrace the object of the prisons of this State. To secure soci- ety and punish offenders are axiomatic rights. Strong, high walls, with fear- less, determined sentinels, are about all the appliances necessary, and the arrangement and material of construc- tion of the Auburn Prison, show it to be ample for that purpose. But self- support and convict reformation re- quire a more complicated material ar- rangement, and involve a higher de- gree of intellectual and moral capacity. To accomplish, in addition to a secure incarceration, so great an undertaking, a profitable system of labor must be devised ; contamination from evil asso- ciation be prevented, and a moral cul- ture instituted whereby the perverse tendencies of humanity can be trans- formed. The object presupposes intel- ligent moral managers, with an especial adaptation to the task. To present the approximation of the New York 1865.] Our State Prison System. 115 State Prisons to the proposed end, de- fines our present undertaking. In approaching a subject so impor- tant in its social and individual rela- tions as that of prison discipline, it be- hooves us to look well at the abstract on which it is founded, with the prac- tices thence arising; and to examine critically their results, that a compre- hensive view may be presented for the judgment of mankind. The Auburn system of prison dis- cipline is peculiar in feature and un- mistakable in character. It is also the type of a majority of the State prisons of civilized nations, and the competitor for public favor of a system having principles and practices radi- cally diverse. In the abstract, it is a system of physical coercion, in which the idea of moral government enters not at all. The reason and the pas- sions are overlooked, and the uncon- trollable emotions, save one, are disre- garded in its administration. Fear is the element toward which its entire police regulation is directed. Upon this theory was its government orig- inally founded, and every departure from it is a departure from its elemen- tary principle. In the early history of the Auburn Prison, when the convicts were em- ployed on its own construction, work- ing together with little restraint to- wards each other during the day, and at night huddled promiscuously in apartments, each accommodating fif- teen or more individuals, without method or any settled plan of disci- pline, John D. Cray—an Englishman by birth, a retired soldier of the Brit- ish army, and a coppersmith by trade, assumed its police regulation. To this remarkable personage, endowed with wonderful physical endurance—mak- ing little difference between day and night in prosecuting his arduous la- bors ; possessed of uncommon energy and decision of character, as portrayed in the result of his undertaking ; and who, though unaided except by the work of his own hands, possessed a fund of knowledge seldom equalled even by those on whom wealth and station had showered their favors—be- longs the fame, whether it be good or whether it be evil, of defining and executing a system of prison polity which has arrested the attention of civilized man. The peculiar features of this system are, associated labor by day, entire isolation by night, and at all times perfect non-intercourse between the convicts. It has no reference to a re- formation of the criminal; nor to the product of his labor being more than incidentally the means of his support, but is calculated for him solely as an offender against society and under sentence of imprisonment at hard la- bor, as the penalty of his crime. Now, to carry out a system appa- rently so incompatible with the inhe- rent nature of man, penalties commen- surate to its obstacles must be institu- ted, and corporeal punishment was re- sorted to as the means of its attain- ment. This punishment was of vari- ous kinds, but that usually employed was the cat. So long as it was the ordinary instrument of coercing obedi- ence, a visitor might pass through the working apartments without being ob- served by any, or at least very few ol the inmates; and communication be- tween the convicts by either sign or speech was almost wholly suppressed. The constant fear of the lash kept them in as constant subjugation to the rules, but the ceaseless strife thus waged between the will and the in- stincts could not long exist without, in some degree, inducing indiflerence to the penalty, or injury to the mental faculties. Every sound that vibrates on the ear is a call to some other sense to assist in its relief, and each emotion has its demand upon some other fac- 116 Our State Prison System. [August, ulty to relieve or help in its manifes- tation. This means of enforcing obedience was for many years comparatively suc- cessful ; but its demoralizing influence on him who inflicted it, and the moral and physical danger to him who bore it, became alike abhorrent to public sentiment. To illustrate: Rachel Welch, while laboring under the pri- mal curse pronounced against her sex for disobedience in Eden, became re- fractory, for which she was terribly whipped by the keeper in charge. The occurrence was made the subject of a grand jury inquest, and resulted in a condemnation by the court. A legis- lative investigation was also instituted, and a statute passed December 10, A. D. 1827, that "no female convict, con- fined in any prison, shall be punished by whipping, for any misconduct in such prison." Again: Dan Smith be- came insane and refused to work. In- stead of an asylum to restore the un- fortunate being, the cat was applied to cure the " crazy man." He was whip- ped and sent to his cell. In the excit- ed state of his mind he rent to shreds his wearing apparel. On the following morning he was wh'pped for destroy- ing his clothes. On the succeeding night he not only destroyed the clothes on his body, but his bedding shared the same fate. Again the cat was applied as the sole panacea for his malady, but with as little success- as before. This course was pursued at intervals for months, until at last, after having suffered more than loss of life, he was, through executive clemency, turned upon the community, disabled in body and ruined in mind, a living monument to the barbarity of this mode of prison punishment. Again : The lifeless body of Charles S. Plumb became, February, A. D. 1846, the sub- ject of a coroner's inquest. The facts were these: The warden testified that the convict, previous to being whipped, went above and broke out some win- dow glass, and threw out a jug of oil, with some other property; that, at another time, when making a noise in his cell, and being asked for his name, he replied " steamboat," the only an- swer he would make ; at another time he tore the books and bedding of his cell, and his own clothes. The preced- ing warden testified that Plumb was a " wayward boy, but not malicious ; his conduct was strange, but did not indicate insanity ; his strangeness was a violation of rules without any ap- parent motive, when he was liable to be punished." Now, it requires but little reflection to perceive that the testimony of both these wardens is nearly, if not quite, sufficient to es- tablish his mental alienation. The commission of those petty acts with- out motive, for which he had been re- peatedly whipped, and knew he would again be, should have sufficed to pre- vent further inflictions. But his in- sanity escaped their observation, not- withstanding it was shown by a former employer of Plumb to have existed previous to his conviction, and it was proved to be the opinion of many in the prison that he was of unsound mind. On the post-mortem examination, the posterior surface of the trunk ap- peared so lacerated that the number of stripes could not be determined, but that there were not less than be- tween three hundred and sixty and six hundred was shown by testimony. During the chastisement the constitu- tional irritation commenced in invol- untary serous evacuations. This was soon followed by prostration, succeed- ed by rigors with only a slight reac- tion. Then came high delirium, which soon degenerated into stupor, gradual- ly becoming comatose, and finally, after less than four days' sickness, termina- ting in dissolution. The cutaneous is, perhaps, the most sensitive and exten- 1865.] Our State Prison System. 117 sively diffused portion of the nervous system, and its sympathies are with the whole economy. The enervation commenced with the diarrhoea; the relation of parts was broken, and the physical stamina proved inadequate to sustain the shock, although the convict was in good health at the time of pun- ishment. Thus, under the lash perished a human being, from whose mind God had removed the light of reason, pos- sibly to set in stronger light before the eyes of men the inhumanity and the danger of this means of enforcing discipline. The Board of Inspectors shortly af- ter superceded the warden, and the succeeding Legislature passed an act— December 14th, A. D. 1847—" prohib- iting the infliction of any blows what- ever upon any convict except in self- defence." But with the loss of the cat came also the loss of that disci- pline which had rendered famous this prison, both at home and abroad. *• The shower bath, the yoke, and the dungeon, with some minor appliances, then became the means of maintaining order, and although in appearance they seem less severe, yet every agency by which the refractory can be subdued requires critical investigation. To convey an adequate idea of the force of the bath, when used as a cor- rective would be difficult indeed; for while the culprit may exhibit no signs of extraordinarjr suffering, portions of the internal organization, both in func- tion and structure, may have succumb- ed to its incomprehensible power. Phrenitis, amurosis, epilepsy, insanity and death are among its darker phases, while those delicate shades of mental injury, seen only in occasional aberra- tions, must be of frequent occurrence. To illustrate:—Convict No. 4958, in the Auburn Prison, said that "while in the stocks his head ached as though it would certainly split open, when all at once it stopped and there was no more pain." He came out an insane man, hopelessly incurable, though at times he conversed understandingly about it. He was subsequently trans- ferred to the State Lunatic Asylum. Convict No. 5669 was showered with six pails of water discharged through a half-inch jet. Shortly after he fell in- to convulsions from which he emerged with a mind totally destroyed. The executive, in consequence of the inju- ry, bestowed upon him a pardon, but he did not long survive. Convict No. 4565, aged thirty-eight years, in good health, was showered with three pails of iced water discharged through a cribriform plate. He was taken from the stocks in convulsions which con- tinued about thirty minutes. He had congestion of the brain, followed by severe cephalgia and mental derange- ment. He was bled and ultimately recovered. Another convict was struck with blindness in the stocks, and over two years elapsed before his sight re- turned. On a coronor's inquest, held at the Auburn Prison, the jury found " That Samuel Moore—a convict— came to his death in the State Prison at Auburn on the second day of De- cember, A. D. 1858, from a cause which we are unable to determine positively, yet we believe, from the evidence, that it was hastened by the punishment which had been inflicted upon him; but we have no reason to believe that said punishment was un- usual in Such case, or that any of the officers of said prison were at fault in the matter" notwithstanding every witness concurred in the fact of the soundness of the convicts health at the time of his punishment. It was also proved that three barrels of iced water were showered upon him at in- tervals during a period of forty-five minutes ; that the water ran into his mouth ; that during the death strug- gles which were so fierce that, wrench- ing his hands from their film fasten- 118 Our State Prison System. [August, ings he slipped from his seat and was actually hung by his neck in the stocks, and that he expired in five minutes after reaching the hospital. On the happening of this occurrence the inspectors " Resolved that after this date the use of the shower bath as a means of punishment in any of the State Prisons of this State, be and the same is hereby prohibited." But from the shifting, unstable management of them, it is again in full opera- tion. Dangerous and destructive as these instances were, and difficult of intelli- gent application as this means of pun- ishment is, other cases, where neither injury nor even punishment were in- flicted, tell with much force against a mode so difficult of comprehension. Convict No. 5446, seventeen years old, was showered with three barrels of water with little or no unpleasant ef- fects, as he himself confessed. Notwithstanding its severity in the generality of cases, the uncertainty of its results renders it a doubtful means of enforcing discipline. The fear it excites in the officers generally, and a knowledge of the existence of that fear emboldens the convicts in multi- plied arts of petty disobediencies until the officer, wearied with his own fears and their insubordination, too often recklessly subjects the offender to the full measure of his displeasure. Thus by it the discipline is impaired, the officers irritated and the convict en- dangered. On interrogating a keeper of the Auburn Prison who had applied this instrument of punishment for several years in succession, and had witnessed its effects in perhaps more cases than any other individual con- nected with it, he replied " that all the information he had acquired as a guide to its use was, that the oftener a convict was showered, the less able he was to bear it." This conclusion, the result of careful obsei vation, shows that accumulative injury was the ef- fect of its repetition. The yoke is formed of a flat bar of iron, four or five inches broad, from five to six feet long, and varies from thirty to forty pound in weight. It is furnished with an iron staple in the centre to receive the convict's neck, and one at each end for encircling the wrists so arranged with screws on the back as to admit of fastening the arms stretched to their full extent. The centre staples rests on the lower cervi- cal vertebra, and the bar crosses the chest in front. The severity of its application when it falls upon a con- vict of indomitable disposition, with a powerful physical organization and un- governable passions, was sadly por- trayed by convict No. 5904. He wore the yoke six hours and twenty min- utes—two hours being the full average time. His passions were so excessive- ly excited that he made no confession of fault nor promise of future improve- ment, but breathed forth threats of ultimate vengeance. The yoke was removed and he sent to the dungeon. When brought to the hospital on the next morning, his face and eyes were inflamed ; the surface of the chest and abdomen was mottled, inflamed and excessively tender; pulse sixty; tongue coated ; appetite lost; sight indistinct; hearing acute ; intellect deranged, and memory impaired. Occasionally his countenance expressed great emotion —momentarily bursting into tears. To relieve the heat of the head, cold water was applied. This, however, was soon relinquished, for on each ap- plication he declared that it scalded his head—so much were his sensations perverted. This punishment is usually inflicted in presence of the convicts of the shop to which the offender belongs. During its application he is a butt of the sly jeers and ridicule of his fellows iu crime, and should he be endowed with 1865.] Our State Prison System. 119 considerable powers of endurance, his suffering is proportionally increased. His pride is aroused, and nothing short of exhausted energy comes to his re- lief; while the more sanguine, but less persistent, show earlier signs of repen- tance, and obtain an earlier release. Thus far the punishments examined are all physical in their application and tendencies. The next, however, varies from them materially. The dungeon—silent, solitary and dark— with its concomitant bread and water diet, is regarded second only in impor- tance in the series of prison coercives. Here again the spirit of opposition and revenge is rife. With the convict it is merely a question of endurance, but to the State, the loss of service, in the self-sustaining system, is of primary consideration. The period of confine- ment is usually short, and, therefore, all hope of improving the convict through it is annihilated. That these means of enforcing obe- dience are injurious to the moral and physical being of the convict—engen- dering hatred toward his fellow-man, or inducing irreparable mental imbe- cility—often rendering him a hopeless object of public charity ; that their in- fliction meets with instinctive opposi- tion from prison officers, and does not complish the desired obedience; that they are cruel to the convict and ex- pensive to the State, none conversant with them can truthfully deny. To remedy this imperfection in the man- agement of these prisons, a judicious combination of the Auburn congregate with the Pennsylvania solitary system, it is believed would be adequate. In- deed, the Legislature perceiving the ne- cessity for some change in their inter- nal government, enacted in eighteen hundred and forty-seven, laws looking to such a modification for partial relief. But they are so imperfectly digested ; so much at the discretion of prison of- ficials ; so wanting in unity of design, and so at variance with the existing plan of support by contract labor, that they are little more than a dead letter- So long as the present financial policy is persisted in, it is clearly evident that no radical reformatory change can be ef- fected. Without an intimate knowledge of convict character, no successful system of prison government can be devised. Subject to like motives as other men, the mass of convicts are unlike them in being the slaves of particular mo- tives, and unlike other men because they care not to restrain the propen- sity to gratify those motives. Below mediocrity in intellectual power, art- ful in low cunning devices, wanting in moral sensibility and moral courage, with preponderating animal desires and no habits of reflection, they lack that steady, considerate, self-control which makes man the master of his appe- tites and passions. To this unbalanced though normal condition, must be at- tributed many of the petty disobedi- encies so common in the prisons. Many infractions are merely emotional impulses, and to punish inherent frail- ties with the severity belonging to de- liberate offences is manifestly wrong. There is, probably, no portion of man- kind so easily controlled, as that, whose destiny it is to occupy a prison home. Individual exceptions, however, are surely to be encountered. Law- less, desperate and depraved ; at large, they respect no law, and in incarcera- tion defy restraint. These individuals are to be subdued, and experience proves it no common task. To resist all physical coercion is the very life of their being; and in inflicting punish- ment, serious injuries occur to both keepers and convicts. To this class of criminals the just, the appropriate, the humane means of discipline is perma- nent solitary confinement. In it no conflicts arise. All is quiet, enforcing meditation, from which alone reforma- 120 Paul Granger's Choice. [August, tion, as a legitimate result of punition, can reasonably be expected. Solitary confinement excites more dread in the convict mind than physical liability. A disciplinary code, in which each of- fence should have a definite period of seclusion, accompanied with instru- ments for voluntary labor, and judicious restraints in diet, such seclusion to be increased in duration with each addi- tional infraction, would rapidly de- crease the minor offences, and ultimate in the permanent separation of the hopelessly-incorrigible. Such a com- bination of prison polities would prove less injurious, more just and more ef- fective than either one alone. In it, the congregate system would represent the penalty of crime against society, and the solitary system the penalty against prison regulations. The two? effectually conjoined, would present emphatically an American System of Prison Discipline. PAUL GRANGER'S CHOICE CHAPTER TWO. " Think you if Laura had been Petrarch's wife, He would have sung her sonnets all his life ?". Byron, At last they are in their new home. The wedding,—the parting from dtar ones—the long journey are over. The pretty cottage, with all its tasteful adornings, looks still lovelier now that approaching summer is adding her fin- ishing touches. The piazza, before quite an unimpor- tant feature, is charming with its ten- der green vines, deepening every day into richer drapery; while the inte- rior has lost the expectant air it had the last time we looked upon it, and wears instead a pleasant occupied look. Very pleasant had it seemed to Laura when she came ; and she would have loved to throw her arms about her young husband's neck and thank him for taking such pains to p'ease her. But she simply said how pretty she thought it. " Even a piano," said she; " what a pity I play so little. But when Agnes comes, it will be charming. You remember how you enjoyed her music when you came last fall." Happily she did not look in her husband's face as she inflicted this blow. An ordinary observer would have said she ought to be happy. Her hus- band was uniformly courteous and kind ; that is, so far as a husband can be kind when he makes his wife feel that she lives merely upon the surface of his life ; but that in his innermost thoughts and feelings she has no share, and is never permitted to enter. Laura tried for a few weeks to be- lieve she was content; that this twi- light happiness, in the first year of her marriage, would satisfy her in the stead of that noon-day fulness she had expected. But she came gradually to the consciousness that she was wretch- ed ; that what she had tried to believe was content, was utter desolation of heart. Still, she must hide from him her misery. It was the very thing against which he had warned her. And so the wall of reserve grew daily deeper and higher. She never failed to meet him with a smile. No deli- cate housewife care was spared to make his home attractive. She was ever ready with bright cheering conversa- tion upon the subject he loved, to make his evenings pass pleasantly. Her lit- tle songs even, although she felt very WEED'S HIGHEST PREMIUM SHUTTLE SEWING MACHINE HAS ONLY TO BE SEEN AND OPERATED TO BE APPRECIATED. Call and see for yourselves before purchasing. Please bring sample of various kinds of thread (such as is usually found at Btores), and various kinds of fabric, which you know the former most popular Sewing Machines either cannot work at all, or, at best, very imperfectly. STJPEEIOBITY over any other Machine in the market will be seen at a glance. 1st. It runs easily and rapidly, and is so constructed as to endure all kinds of usage. 2d. No breaking of threads in going over seams. 3d. No imperfect action of the feed at uneven places in the work. 4th. The Weed Stitch catches of itself, and will sew from the finest lace to the heaviest loather, and from 200 cotton to coarse linen thread. 5th. The Weed Machine will do beautiful quilting on the bare wadding, without using inner lining, thus leaving it soft as if done by hand. 6th. The variety of fancy work that can be done on the "WEEID MACHINE, with so little trouble, makes it equal, if not superior, to six machines combined ; for instance, it binds, hems, tucke, and sews on the band at the same time, and, in fact, the WEED NO. 2 MACHINE, as before stated, is equivalent to a combination of any six ordinary machines. Orders for machines may be sent through the American Advertising Agency, 389 Broad- way, N. Y. Below we give a few prices :— ' No. % Oil Black walnut, Ornamented with Hemmer.....$60 00 No. a Oil Black Walnut, Half Case, Ornamented with Hemmer . 05 00 No. 2 Extra Oil-Polished Black "Walnut, Half Case, Large Tahle, Beauti- fully Ornamented............7500 WEED SEWING MACHINE CO, 508 BROADWAY, NEW YOEK. FEDERAL AMERICAN MONTHLY. This well-established Monthly commences a New Volume with the July Number. Already pronounced by both American and English Critics one of the very best Magazines of our country, it will continue to maintain its high ground as an Inde- pendent, Literary, and Critical Monthly aiming at a yet higher standard. The ablest pens of the day, will contribute to its pages, articles of living interest and value. Ambitious to become the best Monthly offered to the public, it invites com- parison, from month to month, with other magazines. In the treatment of political subjects, it will countenance no party proclivities that are not in loyal abeyance to the Fcederal Cause and Constitution. Resurrecting no Dead Issues, and probing no ancient wounds, its Retrospect of the Past will be subordinate to wise considerations for the Present and the Future. The Rebellion crushed, it is for Statesmanship and Humanity to combine in a healing of the Na- tion, a binding up of its hurts, and a calming ot its apprehensions. We have en- dured War : we now want Peace. We have poured out our blood lavishly: let us now pour oil on the waters of strife, and sweeten our wells of bitterness with the olive-branch of fraternal kindness. With new facilities for increased circulation and an enlarged field for enterprise, we feel confident ot securing the favor of our reading public. We shall, as publishers, do our part to merit entire success. The Editorial Conduct of the Monthly will assure its literary excellence. The name of Professor J. Holmes Agnew, long associated with its pages, and of A. J. IJ. Duganne, whose connection commences with the July issue, are guaranties of its' future. The Fgederal American Monthly will hereafter be published simultaneously in Washington and New York, on or before the 20th of each month preceding that of date; and will be for sale by all periodical dealers throughout the country. Dealers supplied through the American News Company, 119 and 121 Nassau street, New York. 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