Page:Memoirs of Vidocq, Volume 2.djvu/275

 the various modes of escape by which the guilty but too often succeed in setting at defiance the sagacity of the judge.

I will display to the glare of noon-day the faults of our criminal informations, and the still greater errors of our penal code, so absurd in many of its enactments. I will ask for alterations, revisions; and what I ask will be conceded: because reason, come from where she may, is always sooner or later understood. I will offer important ameliorations in the regulations of prisons and bagnes; and as I compassionate more deeply than another can, the sufferings of my old companions in misery, condemned or pardoned, I will probe the wound to the bottom; and shall, perhaps, be the happy man who will offer to a philanthropic legislator the only remedies which it is possible to apply, and which alone will be not temporising but effective. In delineations, as varied as novel, I will give original traits of many classes of society, destitute as yet of all civilization; or rather which have emanated from her and infest her, attended by all that is hideous and infamous. I will mould with fidelity the physiognomy of these "paria castes;" and I will so contrive, that the necessity of some institutions to purify them, as well as to regulate the manners of a portion of the people, shall result; for having had closer and more frequent opportunities of studying them than any other person, I can give a more exact account of them. I will satisfy curiosity on more heads than one; but that is not the end I aim at. Corruption must be lessened by it, the blemishes on propriety must be more rare, prostitution must cease to be the consequence of certain peculiarities of situation; and those nameless depravities so abhorrent, that those who have abandoned themselves to them have been placed out of the pale of the law as a punishment for their outrage on morals, as well as for the protection of the correct portion of society, should disappear, or cease to be, by their infamous publicity, a perpetual object of just offence to the man who obeys and