Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 V13.djvu/298

 On arriving in the town, we found the court engaged in deciding upon the fate of a criminal, who had committed a rape upon the unprotected, and almost infant person of a daughter of his late wife.[215] The legal punishment, in this and the Missouri territory, for this crime, castration! is no less singular and barbarous, however just, than the heinous nature of the crime itself. The penitentiary law of confinement, so successfully tried in the states of Pennsylvania and New York, for every crime short of murder, is an improvement in jurisprudence, which deserves to be adopted in every part of the United States. It often reclaims the worst of the human race, learns them habits of industry with which they had been unacquainted, and corrects those vices which perhaps ignorance {225} and parental indulgence had fostered. There is certainly a flagrant want of humanity in the multiplicity of sanguinary and stigmatizing punishments. To sacrifice all that portion of the community to infamy, who happen to fall beneath the lash of the law, is incompatible with the true principles of justice. Maim a man, or turn him out with the stigma of infamy into the bosom of society, and he will inevitably become a still greater scourge to the world, in which he now only lives to seek revenge by the commission of greater but better concealed crimes.

Interest, curiosity, and speculation, had drawn the attention of men of education and wealth toward this country, since its separation into a territory; we now see an additional number of lawyers, doctors, and mechanics. The retinue and friends of the governor, together with the officers of justice, added also essential importance to the