d is an extensive one, and its
outer limits are near to every hearthstone. To all these, prison life,
unless it is relieved by a hope of restoration to the world at the hand
of mercy, is the school of vice, and a certain preparation for a career
of crime. As a matter of fact, this class does furnish recruits to
supply the places of the hardened villains who annually die, or
permanently forsake the abodes of civilized men. What hope can there be
for a young man who remains in prison until the last day of his sentence
is measured by the sun in his course, and then passes into the world,
with the mark of disgrace and the mantle of shame upon him, to the
society of the companions by whose influence he first fell? For such a
one there can be no hope. And be it always remembered that there are
those without the prison walls, as well as many within, who resist every
effort to bring the wanderers back to obedience and right. I was present
at the prison in Charlestown when the model of a bank-lock was taken
from a young man whose term had nearly expired. The model was cut in
wood, after a plan drawn upon sand-paper by an experienced criminal,
then recently convicted. This old offender was so familiar with the
lock, that he was able to reproduce all its parts from memory alone.
This fact shows the influence that may be exerted, even in prison, upon
the characters of the young and less vicious. Now, can any doubt that
these classes, as classes, ought to be separated? Nor let the question
be met by the old statement, that all communication between prisoners
should be cut off. Humanity cannot defend, as a permanent system, the
plan which shuts up the criminal, unless he is a murderer, from the
light of the human countenance. Such penalties foster crimes, whose
roots take hold of the state itself.

The result of the exercise of the pardoning power is believed to have
been, upon the whole, satisfactory. This is the concurrent testimony of
officers and others whose opinions are entitled to weight. Permit the
statement of a single case, to which many similar ones might be added.
In a remote state of the West there is a respectable and successful
farmer, who was once sentenced to the penitentiary for life. His crime
was committed in a moment of desperation, produced by the contrast
between a state of abject poverty in a strange land, at the age of
twenty-three, and the recollection of childhood and youth passed beneath
the parental roof,