Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/223

 2. I very much doubt the efficacy of the effort to prevent wrongdoing or to elevate the standards of life by punishment. I have scrutinized the faces of men in the dock, observed their conduct and listened to their stories, endeavoring to see whether I could find any line with which to separate them from those outside, and always in vain. Men are as they are born and as the hammering of life leaves them. Most of the misconduct comes from the incapacity to think accurately and properly to foresee consequences. I am satisfied that most men do the best that they are able to do with their characters and the circumstances which confront them. Since the beginning of the historic period, some eight thousand years ago, the annals of mankind have been filled with the records of attempts to prevent by the infliction of punishment certain lines of conduct considered at the time objectionable, but often recognized at later periods to have been conducive to the advancement of the race. Experience has shown these attempts ever to have been futile. All kinds of punishment have been tried—hanging, beheading, burning, mutilating, disemboweling, quartering, gouging out the eyes, cutting out the tongue, cropping the ears, branding, standing in the stocks, drowning, using the rack and the thumbscrew and many others which ingenuity in this direction could devise. Strange as it may seem, the effect always seems to be to increase the numbers of offenses. Violence begets violence. The burning of negroes in the South has immeasurably increased the cases of special crime it was intended to prevent. In Jamaica, where no such spectacles occur, this particular crime is almost unknown. In modern life old forms of punishment have been abandoned, except that of death for murder and incarceration for other offenses. The former is an anachronism and will soon have disappeared. It must be plain to any philosophical observer that the latter is slowly giving way. A prison is now conducted like a home. The 14