Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/141

Rh committed by Americans, has diminished a good deal in fifty years. Such crime, I think, never bore so small a proportion to the population, wealth, and activity of Boston, as now. Even if we take all the offences committed by these strangers who have come amongst us, it does not compare so very unfavourably, as some allege, with the "good old times." I know men often look on the fathers of this colony as saints; but in 1635, at a time when the whole State contained less than one-tenth of the present population of Boston, and they were scattered from Weymouth Fore-River to the Merrimack, the first grand jury ever impannelled at Boston "found" a hundred bills of indictment at their first coming together.

If you consider the circumstances of tho class who commit the greater part of the crimes which get punished, you will not wonder at the amount. The criminal court is their school of morals ; the constable and judge are their teachers; but under this rude tuition I am told that the Irish improve, and actually become better. The children who receive the instruction of our public schools, imperfect as they are, will be better than their fathers; and their grand-children will have lost all trace of their barbarian descent.

I have often spoken, of our penal law as wrong in its principle, taking it for granted that the ignorant and miserable men who commit crime do it always from wickedness, and not from the pressure of circumstances which have brutalized the man ; wrong in its aim, which is to take vengeance on the offender, and not to do him a good in return for the evil he has done ; wrong in its method, which is to inflict a punishment that is wholly arbitrary, and then to send the punished man, overwhelmed with new disgrace, back to society, often, made worse than before,—not to keep him till we can correct, cure, and send him back a reformed man. I would retract nothing of what I have often said of that; but not long ago all this was worse; the particular statutes were often terribly unjust ; the forms of trial afforded the accused but little chance of justice; the punishments were barbarous and terrible. The plebeian tyranny of the Lord Brethren in New England was not much lighter than the patrician despotism of the Lord Bishops in the old world, and was more insulting. Let me mention a few facts, to refresh the memories of those who