me flourished, not because of the law's severity, but in spite
of it. It is possible that our respected and respectable ancestors
understood the situation as it then was a trifle better than we can
understand it on the hither side of this gulf of years, and that they
were not the reasonless barbarians that we think them to have been.
And if they were, what must have been the unreason and barbarity of the
criminal element with which they had to deal?

I am far from thinking that severity of punishment can have the same
restraining effect as probability of some punishment being inflicted;
but if mildness of penalty is to be superadded to difficulty of
conviction, and both are to be mounted upon laxity in detection, the
"pile" will be "complete" with a vengeance. There is a peculiar fitness,
perhaps, in the fact that all these ideas for comfortable punishment
should be urged at a time when there appears to be a tolerably general
disposition to inflict no punishment at all. There are, however, still a
few old-fashioned persons who hold it obvious that one who is ambitious
to break the laws of his country will not with as light a heart and as
airy an indifference incur the peril of a harsh penalty as he will the
chance of one more nearly resembling that which he would select for
himself.

III.

After lying for more than a century dead I was revived, given a new
body, and restored to society. This was in the year 2015. The first
thing of interest that I observed was an enormous building, covering a
square mile of ground. It was surrounded on all sides by a high, strong
wall of hewn stone upon which armed sentinels paced to and fro. In one
face of the wall was a single gate of massive iron, strongly guarded.
While admiring the cyclopean architecture of the "reverend pile" I was
accosted by a man in uniform, evidently The Warden, with a cheerful
salutation.

"Colonel," I said, pressing his hand, "it gives me pleasure to find some
one that I can believe. Pray tell me what is this building."

"That," said the colonel, "is the new State penitentiary. It is one of
twelve, all alike."

"You surprise me," I replied. "Surely the criminal element must have
increased enormously."

"Yes, indeed," he assented; "under the Reform _regime_, which began in
your day, it became so powerful, bold and fierce that arrests were no
longer possible and the prisons then in existence were soon overcrowded.
The State was compelled to erec