ety are apt to have, and partly to the fact that they are encouraged to a frank expression. They are in no danger of losing caste by any opinion, and they seem to enjoy saying absolutely what they think on all moral questions that arise. I am quite sure that for various reasons, some creditable and some otherwise, the tendency here is to intellectual honesty. I asked the superintendent what relation this had to moral honesty; whether men cultivating this attitude as to abstract questions would be less likely to lie; and he promised to institute some inquiries and tests on this point.

Another question was this: What is the relation of intellectual ability as shown by the position in the school classes, to standing as shown by the grades? In other words, what is the relation of mental activity and progress to conduct? This is one of the most important inquiries in regard to a reformatory, for the charge is constantly made that education only sharpens criminals, and does not help conduct. The reply is in the following table, which is to me most interesting and encouraging :

I was led to make this inquiry because I saw in the morality class men of all grades. In this table it will be noticed that in the highest class, A, the percentage of the first-grade men is 59.3, of the second grade, 36, of the third grade, only 4.7. As we pass down in the school classes, the proportions keep changing, until we reach the lowest primary, in which there is only a per

centage of 9.4 in the first grade, but 62.3 in the second grade, and 28.3 in the third grade. The first grade numbers now about two hundred, and of course contains all the men on the high road to be paroled. The middle grade is most numerous, for all are placed there on entering, and men are constantly passing through it, up or down. The third grade is the smallest.

The large clerical labor is done by the inmates. They set the type and run the hand-press that is kept busy printing the daily reports, the syllabuses for school, etc. The institution publishes also a weekly newspaper, distributed Sunday morning, called "The Summary." It is a small neat sheet of two leaves. A prisoner makes for it a complete condensed summary of the news of the week, excluding all scandal and reports of crime. It contains, besides, local prison news, often letters or extracts from letters of released and paroled men (" graduates "), perhaps a little fun, and brief editorials by the superintendent, who is the editor. It is about the only thoroughly clean family newspaper I know; certainly, there are few journals published outside that are fit to circulate inside this prison. It needs a good world to stand some of our newspapers; a prison can not.

In this simple presentation of what I saw at Elmira lies the answer to the question, whether we can probably better our present treatment of criminals. It remains to add the statistical results of eight years of experiment. I should say, inferentially, that no matter what a man's motive may be in submitting to the hard threefold discipline of this institution, with whatever hypocrisy he might behave well, study hard, and work industriously, some years of such discipline must affect his character and affect it radically; in many cases working a regeneration of his whole moral nature and purpose in life. I do not see how he can be in the habit of well-doing in these three ways for a long time and not be radically changed. In fact, the reports show that eighty per cent. of the men going out from here are reformed. That is to say, they do not again fall under the law; it is not supposed that they become saints, but they are fairly law-abiding, do not commit felonies; as somebody wittily said, the object of the institution is to teach men to steal legally. The men are closely watched for six months after they go out, and a general run is kept of many afterward. Some, of course, are discharged because they have served the maximum time, not because they are fit to go. In many cases, where a man would probably prefer an VOL. CXL.-NO. 341.

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honest life, he is so morally debilitated by inheritance and indulgence, that it takes a long time to build up in him enough moral stamina to carry him along safely in life; and the time of detention is often too short. This result-eighty per cent. put in a better way—is astonishing, when we remember that of those ordinarily discharged from State-prisons, sixty per cent. have to be caught and imprisoned again. Certainly that is not a paying thing for the State.

As to economy, I notice by the reports that the Elmira Reformatory does not pay. Its inmates earn by labor from $60,000 to $75,000 a year, but the State has to appropriate annually about $30,000 to carry it on. It is money well spent; for it would cost the State in cash a good deal more than $30,000 a year to catch, try, and send to prison those who would repeat felonies on being discharged, if these men followed the Stateprison rule. And this does not take into account the depredations they would commit, the injury to individuals, their bad moral influence, nor the cost of police to catch them.

With such results, the Elmira Reformatory is worthy of the most thoughtful attention of tax-payers, as well as of sociologists. CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER.

THE LAW'S DELAY.

BEFORE and since Hamlet's soliloquy was written, the law's delay has been a by-word and reproach, a source of anxiety and unhappiness, the cause of mental distress and financial disaster, the object of poetic contempt, an actual impediment to the advance of civilization, and an obstruction to the development of the science of law. Rules of law and statutes should accord with common sense, agree with logical reasoning, avoid absurd consequents, and result, when put in practice, in rapid but not hasty or ill-considered settlement of forensic disputes.

The principal source of the law's delay is the law's defects, originating immediately in the venality, neglect, or incapacity of legislators, which springs from their election by the ignorance, corruption, or partisanship of a class of suffragists who too often hold the balance of power in elections. How to reach the taproot of the evil is the deep and vital question to this country. As the suffrage is the original, ultimate, irresistible power on which the general and State governments rest and their perpetuity depends, nothing else can be so important as the purity and intelligence of the ballot; yet the ballot is in the hands of some who are wholly ignorant of its object and its power; of others who sell it under a thin veil in open market to the highest bidder; and of a much larger number who use it to gratify passionate and unreasoning partisanship, the meaning of whose banner-cry is, "For the offices we are patriots."

There are remedies for this public malady, but to adopt and administer them requires patience, courage, and wisdom. The voter has the jewel of modern, and therefore American, civil liberty in his hands, and he too often casts it in the dust. He is invested with a unit of the only arbitrary power in the government, but regards it with thoughtless indifference, or exercises it with reckless passion. The only certain and substantial relief

from this condition lies in the education of the people, and the development of the free and enlightening spirit of commerce, which is the best of educators, by improving and connecting, when possible, our great natural water-ways, and opening to us the markets and patronage of the world. The dense illiteracy in many parts of the United States, shown by the last census, is an argument in behalf of public education that no statesman who loves humanity can with sound reason oppose. The man who is too indolent or too perverse to avail himself of the opportunities to learn to read and write that are offered in this country, is undeserving of the right to exercise the important function of a voter. Yet public men, either deficient in statesmanship, or dominated by demagogism, will not openly and bravely advocate an educational qualification, for fear of being charged with possessing tendencies to property qualification, although it would indicate no such thing, but clearly the reverse. For if the people become educated, property aristocracy, whose successes have been universally the result of superior intelligence, could never rule them, and they would not consent to other qualifications of suffrage than those based upon equality and composed of elements common to all. If a law were enacted by each State and by Congress that three years from its passage no person who could not read should vote, and four years after its adoption he should not be qualified to vote if he could not write, there would, within that probationary time, be more real advance in common education than this country has seen in half a century. The American sovereign would discontinue misspending his precious hours at least long enough to learn to read and write. The demagogues would rant a little, and some lazy fellows would yawn against the tyrants who, while breaking the shackles of their ignorance, deprive them of the personal freedom of illiteracy; but the bright dawn of intelligence, under such laws, would soon show the folly and weakness of the opposition. With the people educated in letters, and in the laws of trade and commerce, self-interest, observation, and intelligence would demand better statesmanship and more useful and practical legislation. As a consequence, the people would select wiser law-makers, and the primal causes of the law's delay would gradually disappear.

Passing from the blessings we have not to the curses we endure, it is to be noted that the legislators of the present