Have readers and writers of essays on prison discipline ever given attention to the psychological advantages of "separate confinement," as promoting thought, leading to the process of thinking? Have they given sufficient attention to the importance of thinking?' Perhaps not, and the importance of that mental process is properly considered in this part of the subject of prison discipline.

What fills the prison and the almshouse-what makes vice, poverty and crime is the want of thinking, the neglect of the great powers that exist in various degrees in all, and which may be almost indefinitely extended by instruction and practice. That same power of thinking has conferred immortality on men who exercised it to public good, and in their number and influence has been placed the greatness of nations. The distinction between the permanent true greatness of one nation and the littleness and subserviency of another lies in the exercise of thought. The nation that is really great is only a thinking nation. Smitten with the miseries of his own country, and with the obvious causes, the prophet exclaims: "With desolation. is the land made desolate, because there is none that THINKETH in his heart."

What is true of nations is eminently true of individuals, especially as national greatness is nothing but the aggregate of individual distinction. And the man who is said to be a victim of vice and of folly, and the child of misfortune, is only the non-thinker. Victim, indeed-victim of his own thoughtlessness-Child of misfortune!

Dr. Young justly says:

"Look into those you call unfortunate,

And closer viewed, you'll find they were unwise."

Children of crime, children of neglect, are those who look up from the court-house dock and are punished for vices which their parents practised, and which they have unthinkingly incorporated into their moral system.

Folly, vice, crime, and their repetition after punishment are the consequences of a want of thought. Teach your convicts to think, and as you give them food suited to their physical circumstances, so measure out to them mental pabulum upon which their thoughts are to be founded. Give them rest, quiet, repose-that the food of the mind may assimilate, digest, and nourish the soul into thought.

Why did you continue to drink when you saw so many older than yourself going down to destruction from the use of intoxicating liquors ?"

"Oh, I did not think that I should ever entirely yield to the bad habit."

"But when you had yielded to drink, why did you not forbear crime? You saw how all those criminals commenced with, and continued in, drunken habits."

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Yes, but I did not think of it then."

Why did you commit that awful crime when you knew (to say nothing of the punishment of sin in another world) that such crimes are ninety-nine times in a hundred detected and punished?"

"I see it now, but I did not think of it then."

Go through the whole catalogue of errors, of vices,

of crimes; put the question why each was done, and the answer will be

"I DID NOT THINK."

Parents, teachers, friends will prevent crime by teaching the young to think; but when age has settled the habit of unthought, and consequent crime is being "purged away" in the prison cell, then some kind discipline must withdraw the offender from bad associations, and in the silence and solitude of his cell he must be taught to think. There the great distinction of man and brute must be illustrated, and the powers which neglect deadened must be vivified by the breath of instructed and instructive kindness, and the victim, dead in thoughtlessness and crime, be made a living, thinking soul.

We will not argue the point of separate dealing. We know its power-and we know the inefficiency of the other course. Men may be made to talk in classes and under discipline, or they may be made to keep an enforced silence, while nursing evil designs-but it is only in a separate and quiet position that the voice of good instruction avails.

The denunciations from the pulpit or the rostrum to the hundreds of prison offenders, is often only brutum fulmen, ineffective attempts to drive into good intentions, while the gentle voice of persuasion, that is mingled with the wholesome, quiet insinuation of wrong committed, alarms no personal pride and awakens no hostility, it gently lures to repentance and fixes the resolve. The tempestuous preacher, "who mounts the storm and rides upon the wind," gives no proof to the

degraded offender of a divine commission. It is the small, still voice that converts the convict, because it intimates the prisoner's good.

And now, we come to one other requisite of prison discipline.

How shall it be obtained?

We ask the question tremblingly-before we state it fairly; we inquire whether certain qualifications are available, before we have propounded the nature and extent of these qualifications.

The prison must be built correctly, else as a house it will fail in architectural proprieties, and in true adaptability. There must be a general plan for conducting the institution, or it will fail even of the lower purposes of confinement and punishment. But it must be well conducted, and the system must be well administered. Two great qualities seem to be required in one man who shall be called to superintend the penal plan, viz.: administrative qualities as it regards the building and grounds; as it regards the funds and ordinary munitions of the place, what would in older parlance be denominated good husbandry. And to these powers, the will to maintain the prisoners in their places, and to secure from them obedience to the laws of the State and the ordinances of the prison.

To those qualities should be added, if possible, the ability to deprive punctuality of the appearance of severity or, if severity be necessary, then to deprive severity of the appearance of cruelty-to comprehend the character of the convict, and see how much of the crime for which he suffers is due to a depraved heart-how

much springs from accidental associations-to comprehend so much of his business as to feel that he is not at first to look for many virtues in men who have got into a public prison for crimes, nor to conclude that the offender is irreclaimable because he has often been guilty.

Decision and the fulfilment of threats that have been given as monitions, are necessary to the proper government of the place. They are necessary to give efficacy to promises to consider and reward the evidence of improvement. But with all these, while the difference between a high-toned, virtuous man, placed in care over a large number of convicted felons-and those convicted felons under his care, is almost infinite, and cannot fail to appear in the conduct of the superior and the conscience of the convict; that superior must, and if really superior, will, let his clients feel, that the keeper and the kept, the warden and the convict are both human beings, both children of one God, and that the God who has placed one man, by virtue over another, promises to equal both in his love, when both shall by repentance and by reformation entitle themselves to his love.

It is not positive virtue, only relative, that marks the keeper; it is not positive criminality, only relative, that distinguishes the kept. From a distant position there might not be discernible so much difference between the two (between any two) as is apparent when closely compared-just as the twin stars, which are millions and millions of miles apart, seem, when looked at from the standpoint of earth, to be in close proximity, if not