Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/85

Rh The evil does not stop with the infamy. A guilty man has served out his time. He is thoroughly resolved on industry and a moral life. Perhaps he has not learned that crime is wrong, but found it unprofitable. He will live away from the circumstances which before led him to crime. He comes out of prison, and the gaol-mark is on him. Ho now suffers the severest part of his punishment. Friends and relations shun him. He is doomed and solitary in the midst of the crowd. Honest men will seldom employ him. The thriving class look on him with shuddering pity; tho abounding loathe the convict's touch. He is driven among tho dangerous and the perishing; they open their arms and offer him their destructive sympathy. They minister to his wants; they exaggerate his wrongs; they nourish his indignation. His direction is no longer in his own hands. His good resolutions—he knows they were good, but only impossible. He looks back, and sees nothing but crime and the vengeance society takes for the crime. He looks around, and the world seems thrusting at him from all quarters. He looks forward, and what prospect is there? "Hope never comes that comes to all." He must plunge afresh into that miry pit, which at last is sure to swallow him up. He plunges anew, and the gaol awaits him; again; deeper yet; the gallows alone can swing him clear from that pestilent ditch. But he is a man and a brother, our companion in weakness. With his education, exposure, temptation, outward and from within, how much better would the best of you become?

No better result is to be looked for from such a course. Of the one thousand five Iiundred and ninety-two persons in the State's Prison of New York, four hundred have been there more than once. In five years, from 1841 to 1847, there were punished in the House of Correction in this city, five thousand seven hundred and forty-eight persons ; of these three thousand one hundred and forty-six received such a sentence oftener than once. Yes, in five years, three hundred and thirteen were sent thither, each ten times or more! How many found a place in other gaols I know not.

What if fathers treated dull or vicious boys in this manner at home—making them infamous for the first offence, or the first dulness, and then refusing to receive them back