For carrying concealed arms the penalty is imprisonment for three months to one year.

For carrying sharp-pointed knives of considerable length, imprisonment for six months.

The punishment for carrying open or concealed weapons into places of amusement or solemnity is thus prescribed, the punishment, one month to one year for concealed, and three months for open.

But where the person arrested has once before been punished for having concealed arms, he may be punished with very great severity upon the count of bearing them again, from two to five years being the penalty. It is difficult to say where penal houses would be found for those in this country who could be convicted of bearing concealed deadly weapons. If it be necessary to keep the armed and unarmed separate, then the unarmed might have to be sent to the prisons, and the bearers of concealed weapons, being by much the largest number, would be kept abroad that there might be room enough

for them.

Something of the spirit of disregard for laws in this country may be inferred from the fact that the laws against carrying concealed dangerous weapons are very stringent, quite as severe as those against assault and battery or felonious personal assault, yet it is certain that a large portion of the men who reside in, or who come to, the city carry about them concealed weapons, daggers, pistols, bowie-knives, blackjacks, or other instruments equally effective.

There is a sort of "grammatical" test of this great evil of carrying deadly weapons and of its increase and

extent. Formerly, when the newspapers recorded any act of violence, homicide especially, it was customary to say that the offender drew from his pocket a pistol and fired at his antagonist or the one that suffered by his violence. Now the reporter says, that at this stage of the quarrel the prisoner drew his pistol and discharged it, &c. The difference is most expressive. In the former sentence, "A pistol" would seem to intimate an unusual arming; while in the latter, "His pistol" intimates an ordinary companion. Just as we say of a young man, he is suffering from an attack of the gout; while of an older bon vivant it would be said that he suffers from an attack of his old complaint, the gout.

REMARKS UPON REPORTS.

We have received some of our foreign reports of the movements and condition of public prisons, and we make, in another part of the Journal, such notices of their contents as will give some idea of what is done in Europe to alleviate the miseries of prisons, and we wish we could say what is done to ameliorate the condition .of prisoners, but unfortunately, in many parts of Europe the cost of government is so high that it seems to be a necessity to make the product of the prisons subservient to the support of the palace. As soon as the spirit of true philanthropy begins to make itself heard in the discipline of prisons the spirit of cupidity makes itself

felt. Improvement of the convict is no sooner announced than the inquiry is instituted as to the means of making him improve the public treasury.

Why should scoundrels, thieves and homicides be living at the public expense in well-constructed prisons, as if rewarded for their robberies, thefts and homicides?

And that is an idea not without some weight. But for the present we shall only propound another question: Why should the perpetuation of scoundrelism, robbery, theft and homicide be secured by making our prisons social schools, on the Lancasterian system, in which each convict becomes a monitor to conduct the class of criminals in studies of crimes in which he is a little more proficient than his pupils.

A hundred thousand dollars a year, it is said, are spent in the maintenance of a few hundred public and private villians convicted of crime, when, by congregate labor and confinement, they might be made to earn nearly or quite the cost of their maintenance, and perhaps contribute to the reduction rather than the augmentation of taxation.

Some one who really comprehends the great question of social science involved in prison discipline might respond to that query by propounding another question: Why minister to the amount lost to members of society by nurturing felons for the work of felony-why make. the county or State prisons schools of mischief, and provide prisoner "Fagins" to qualify junior offenders in the art of violence and fraud?

But it is said by some that the losses which are made by the expertness of rogues, sharpers, thieves, burglars,

counterfeiters, &c., are individual affairs, and are, therefore, matters for individual complaint and individual redress.

Such an idea is specious. Society is formed for the protection and security of individuals, and therefore each man who is exposed to wrongs by others is entitled to the protection of the whole. And all men are much more concerned in the prevention of crimes and the reformation of criminals than they are in the arrest and punishment of the offender. The law is not intended to be a minister of private vengeance. It is therefore true, if a person is outraged, he is forbidden to administer chastisement to the culprit, forbidden to gratify his private feelings so greatly outraged, and told that he must, in a country of laws, remit his private vengeance to the strong arm of the law. But when the would-be assassin or the violator of innocence is arraigned for public justice no man supposes that the Court of Quarter Sessions or Oyer and Terminer is sitting to deal out sentences for the gratification of private revenge, however insolently or infamously that revenge may have been provoked. To imagine such a case would be to suppose the judges of our criminal court the henchmen of some vindictive citizen, and the bench of public justice would be degraded to the gratification of private hostility.

As soon as a man is arrested for an outrage on the rights or person of a citizen the offender belongs to the State, he is not amenable to individual feelings or private wishes. The sufferer may appear as a witness against the offender, but he is a witness for the Com

monwealth and not for himself; he has no power to add to, or take from, the penalty which the law provides. When the sufferer became a member of the social compact his right to redress his own wrongs was merged in the powers and duties of the State, and if the State may be allowed to judge of the amount of penalties which it will inflict for certain violations of individual rights, it has the power to judge whether it is better to gratify individual desire for revenge or to save to itself (to the community) one who has erred and may be amended. The improved citizen is better than the incarcerated felon; the imprisonment of the robber abstracts for a time a bad individual from society-the improvement of the convict restores to the community an element of good, an element that may be productive of infinite good.

"I have saved a dollar, this week," said a son to his careful father.

"You have done well," replied the parent, "a dollar with interest for ever."

The violator of law, the being impelled by passion, by bad associates, to do wrong habitually, does much harm by his example, his precepts, his association—and thus he enlarges the field and harvest of his bad labor.

The man who is made sensible of the evil to himself and to others of his bad conduct, and goes forth from prison improved, is a continual missionary of good, his very improvement is an evidence of the possibility of making a prison a school of good morals. And his continuance in virtue is the perpetuation and the increase