Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/224

 food is plentiful and nutritious. The sentence is shortened for good behavior. I have frequently had convicts ask me to give them a longer term and transfer them from the county prison to the Eastern Penitentary because in the latter institution they could get tobacco. “Tickets of leave” are now granted which permit prisoners to be out on parole. All of which shows that the old idea of hammering men and putting walls around them to make them better is being gradually ameliorated. In our day the punishment of wives and the whipping of children at home and in schools have been abandoned, and I am quite sure that the day is not far distant when it will be recognized that the punishment of men serves no good purpose. This is of course a different proposition from the suggestion of the abandonment of the use of force to protect person or property or to prevent the commissions of crime. If I shoot a burglar who insists upon coming into my room in the night, I act upon an entirely different principle.

3. The general opinion appears to be that since the social evil has always heretofore existed it is likely to continue for all future time. The same kind of reasoning might once have been applied to royalty, slavery, priestcraft and other institutions which have lost their hold upon the world, after being long retained. Personally, I look aghast upon the complacency with which we permit the destruction of women for the mere wanton gratification of the passions of men and if we gave a tithe of the thought to the subject that we do to the acquisition of property, the evil would soon be eradicated. Its existence, of course, proves that there is some law of nature which society, as now constituted, violates habitually, just as surely as the corn on the foot, which is an abnormal growth of the processes of life, points to the pressure of the boot. If the cause can be found the results can be prevented. It is easily discovered. There is nothing inherently wrong 210