66 or suffering from poverty and want, the victims often of circumstances of evil which almost constitute a necessity, issuing from homes polluted and miserable, from the sight and hearing of loathsome impurities and hideous discords, to avenge upon society the ignorance, and destitution, and neglect with which it is too often justly chargeable. In 1846 three hundred of these youthful violators of law were sentenced to jails and other places of punishment in Massachusetts, where they incurred the fearful liability of being still more thoroughly corrupted by contact with older criminals, familiar with atrocity, and rolling their loathsome vices as a sweet morsel under the tongue." In view of this state of things the Reform School has been established, twenty-two thousand dollars having been contributed to the State for that purpose by an unknown benefactor of his race. The school is located in Westboro', on a fine farm of two hundred acres. The buildings are in the form of a square, with a court in the centre, three stories in front, with wings. They are constructed with a good degree of architectural taste, and their site is happily chosen, a gentle eminence, overlooking one of the loveliest of the small lakes which form a pleasing feature in New England scenery. From this place the atmosphere and associations of the prison are excluded. The discipline is strict, as a matter of course; but it is that of a well-regulated home or school-room, order, neatness, and harmony within doors; and without, the beautiful sights, and sounds, and healthful influences of Nature. One would almost suppose that the poetical dream of Coleridge, in his tragedy of Remorse, had found its realization in the Westboro' School, and that, weary of the hopelessness and cruelty of the old penal system, our legislators had embodied in their statutes the idea of the poet : "With other ministrations thou, O Nature, To be a jarring and a dissonant thing Amidst this general dance and minstrelsy." Thus it is that the Christian idea of reformation, rather than revenge, is slowly but surely incorporating itself in our statute books. We have only to look back but a single century to be able to appreciate the immense gain for humanity in the treatment of criminals which has been secured in that space of time. Then the use of torture was common throughout Europe. Inability to comprehend and believe certain religious dogmas was a crime to be expiated by death, or confiscation of estate, or lingering imprisonment. Petty offences against property furnished subjects for the hangman. The stocks and the whipping-post stood by the side of the meeting-house. Tongues were bored with redhot irons and ears shorn off. The jails were loathsome dungeons, swarming with ver - min, unventilated, unwarmed. A century and a half ago the populace of Massachusetts were convulsed with grim merriment at the writhings of a miserable woman scourged at the cart-tail or strangling in the ducking-stool; crowds hastened to enjoy the spectacle of an old man enduring the unutterable torment of the peine forte et dure, — pressed slowly to death under planks, for refusing to plead to an indictment for witchcraft. What a change from all this to the opening of the State Reform School, to the humane regulations of prisons and penitentiaries, to keen-eyed benevolence watching over the administration of justice, which, in securing society from lawless aggression, is not suffered to overlook the true interest and reformation of the criminal, nor to forget that the magistrate, in the words of the Apostle, is to be indeed "the minister of God to man for good!" THOMAS CARLYLE ON THE SLAVE A QUESTION. LATE number of Fraser's Magazine con tains an article bearing the unmistakable impress of the Anglo-German peculiarities of Thomas Carlyle, entitled, "An Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question," which would be interesting as a literary curiosity were it not in spirit and tendency so unspeakably wicked as to excite in every rightminded reader a feeling of amazement and disgust. With a hard, brutal audacity, a blasphemous irreverence, and a sneering mockery which would do honor to the devil of Faust, it takes issue with the moral sense of mankind and the precepts of Christianity. Having ascertained that the exports of sugar and spices from the West Indies have diminished since emancipation, and that the negroes, having worked, as they believed, quite long enough without wages, now refuse to work for the planters without higher pay than the latter, with the thriftless and evil habits of slavery still clinging to them, can afford to give, the author considers himself justified in denouncing negro emancipation as one of the "shams" which he was specially sent into this world to belabor. Had he confined himself to simple abuse and caricature of the self-denying and Christian abolitionists of England- "the broadbrimmed philanthropists of Exeter Hall"— there would have been small occasion for noticing his splenetic and discreditable production. Doubtless there is a cant of philanthropy - the alloy of human frailty and folly — in the most righteous reforms, which is a fair subject for the indignant sarcasm of a professed hater of shows and falsities. Whatever is hollow and hypocritical in politics, morals, or religion, comes very properly within the scope of his mockery, and we bid him God speed in plying his satirical lash upon it. Impostures and frauds of all kinds deserve nothing better than detection and exposure. Let him blow them up to his heart's content, as Daniel did the image of Bell and the Dragon. But our author, in this matter of negro slavery, has undertaken to apply his explosive pitch and rosin, not to the affectation of humanity, but to humanity itself. He mocks at pity, scoffs at all who seek to lessen the amount of pain and suffering, sneers at and denies the most sacred rights, and mercilessly consigns an entire class of the children of his Heavenly Father to the doom of compulsory servitude. He vituperates the poor black man with a coarse brutality which would do credit to a Mississippi slave driver, or a renegade Yankee dealer in human cattle on the banks of the Potomac. His rhetoric has a flavor of the slaveVOL. II 2 |