Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/184

172 of the middle of its striking surface or "face"; and the anvil had a corresponding groove; the "bloom" was first drawn down on the plain part of the anvil to a square section, and then this square bar was rounded in the grooves of hammer and anvil.



HE very recent murder of David C. Hennessey, chief of police of the city of New Orleans, appears to direct public attention to a class of immigrants which has recently sought the hospitable ports of the United States, and, in connection with the constant questions of prison reform and prison economics, to justify a considerable and serious public attention.

The newspaper paragraph which tells what the man to be hanged at ten o'clock had for breakfast at eight, is doubtless appetizing to thousands of honest wage-workers who can not recall sitting down in all their lives to as sumptuous a bill of fare. The libraries of standard fiction provided for incarcerated felons are well enough; though, if the incarcerated felons, when liberated, are at once to take their position as leaders in progress and increasers of the public wealth, they might better be supplanted, perhaps, with works on mechanics and the mechanical motors, steam, electricity, etc. The point in civilization to which the world has arrived renders it impossible that the inmates of prisons should be starved, frozen, or tortured into imbecility. But the question as to how tenderly they should be treated, how delicately cared for, and how comfortably their bodily wants provided for, appears not yet to have been submitted to anything like a consensus of public opinion. Such question, as a matter of fact, appears to be left at large, until selected as a sentimental one for ladies and gentlemen of sympathetic natures and leisure for philanthropies not otherwise bent; and the result is, that when anything is done it is done toward the adding of yet one more burden upon the law-abiding and uncriminal classes, to wit, the providing of increased consolations, if not luxuries, for their law-breaking and criminal brothers and sisters. When we tax the good man for the benefit of the bad man, we ought to tax him as lightly as possible. When the peaceful and useful citizen is assessed to build prisons for the house-breaker and molester of the public quiet, he doubtless should be assessed roundly enough to keep the unruly class secure from the facilities for working further mischief; and nobody will decline to go further, and say that 