prison, two years' slavery, was sanative
enough without the denial of his just compensation?"

We perceived that it would be useless to argue with a man in this
truculent mood, and we silently forbore to urge that the vision of
destitution which the criminal must have before his eyes, advancing hand
in hand with liberty to meet him at the end of his term when his prison
gates opened into the world which would not feed, or shelter, or clothe,
or in any wise employ him, would be a powerful deterrent from future
crime, and act as one of the most efficient agencies of virtue which the
ingenuity of the law has ever invented. But our silence did not wholly
avail us, for our poor misguided friend went on to say:

"Suppose he had a wife and children--he may have had several of both,
for all I know--dependent on him, would it have been particularly
sanative for them to be deprived of his earnings, too?"

"We cannot answer these sophistries," we were exasperated into replying.
"All that we can say is that anything else--anything like what you call
justice to the criminal, the prisoner--would disrupt society," and we
felt that disrupt was a word which must carry conviction to the densest
understanding. It really appeared to do so in this case, for our friend
went away without more words, leaving behind him a manuscript, which we
mentally rejected, while seeing our way to use the material in it for
the present essay; it is the well-known custom of editors to employ in
this way the ideas of rejected contributors.

A few days later we met our friend, and as we strolled beside him in the
maniacal hubbub of the New York streets, so favorable to philosophic
communion, we said, "Well, have you met your namesake since you came to
his rescue against the robber State, or did he really sail on the
cattle-steamer, as he said he was going to do?"

Our friend gave a vague, embarrassed laugh. "He didn't sail, exactly, at
least not on that particular steamer. The fact is, I have just parted
from him at my own door--the outside of it. It appears that the
authorities of that particular line wished to take advantage of him by
requiring him to pay down a sum of money as a guarantee of good faith,
and that he refused to do so--not having the money, for one reason. I
did not understand the situation exactly, but this was not essential to
his purpose, which made itself evident through a good deal of irrelevant
discourse. Since I had seen him, socie