Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/90

86 it renders the matter no better than turn round and make him smart for it. If he has burned my house over my head, and I kill him in return, it does not rebuild my house. I cannot leave him at large to burn other men's houses. He must be restrained. But, if I cure the man, perhaps he will rebuild it—at any rate, will be of some service to the world, and others gain much while I lose nothing.

When the victims of society violated its laws, I would not torture a man for his misfortune, because his father was poor, his mother a brute; because his education was neglected. I would shut him out from society for a time. I would make him work for his own good and the good of others. The evil he had caught from the world I would overcome by the good that I would, present to him. I would not clothe him with an infamous dress, crowd him with other men whom society had. made infamous, leaving them to ferment and rot together. I would not set him up as a show to the public, for his enemy, or his rival, or some miserable fop to come and stare at with merciless and tormenting eye. I would not load him with chains, nor tear his flesh with a whip. I would not set soldiers with loaded guns to keep watch over him, insulting their brother by mocking and threats. I would treat the man with firmness, but with justice, with pity, with love. I would teach the man; what his family could not do for him, what society and the church had failed of, the gaol should do, for the gaol should be a manual labour school, not a dungeon of torture. I would take the most gifted, the most cultivated, tho wisest and most benevolent, yes, the most Christian man in the State, and set him to train up these poor savages of civilization. The best man is the natural physician of the wicked. A violent man, angry, cruel, remorseless, should never enter the gaol except as a criminal. You have already taken one of the greatest, wisest, and best men of this Commonwealth, and set him to watch over the public education of the people. True, you give him little money, and no honour; he brings the honour to you, not asking, but giving that. You begin to see the result of setting such a man to such a work, though unhonoured and ill-paid. Soon you will see it more plainly in the increase