ho are vicious from ignorance or habit, are the subjects of
the experiment. "A shave from a broken loaf" is thought as little of by
the male set of delinquents as by the fair frail. The state of society
now leads so much to great accumulations of humanity, that we cannot
wonder if it ferment and reek like a compost dunghill. Nature intended
that population should be diffused over the soil in proportion to its
extent. We have accumulated in huge cities and smothering manufactories
the numbers which should be spread over the face of a country; and what
wonder that they should be corrupted? We have turned healthful and
pleasant brooks into morasses and pestiferous lakes,--what wonder the
soil should be unhealthy? A great deal, I think, might be done by
executing the punishment of _death_, without a chance of escape, in all
cases to which it should be found properly applicable; of course these
occasions being diminished to one out of twenty to which capital
punishment is now assigned. Our ancestors brought the country to order
by kilting[135] thieves and banditti with strings. So did the French
when at Naples, and bandits became for the time unheard of. When once
the evil habit is altered--when men are taught a crime of a certain
character is connected inseparably with death, the moral habits of a
population become altered, and you may in the next age remit the
punishment which in this it has been necessary to inflict with stern
severity. I think whoever pretends to reform a corrupted nation, or a
disorderly regiment, or an ill-ordered ship of war, must begin by
severity, and only resort to gentleness when he has acquired the
complete mastery by terror--the terror being always attached to the law;
and, the impression once made, he can afford to govern with mildness,
and lay the iron rule aside.

Mr. Mackay talked big of the excellent state of prisons in Ireland.
_J'en doute un peu._ That the warm-hearted and generous Irish would
hurry eagerly into any scheme which had benevolence for its motive, I
readily believe; but that Pat should have been able to maintain that
calm, all-seeing, all-enduring species of superintendence necessary to
direct the working of the best plan of prison discipline, I greatly
hesitate to believe.

Well, leaving all this, I wish Mr. Mackay good luck, with some little
doubt of his success, but none of his intentions. I am come in my work
to that point where a lady who works a stocking must count by