In reading over this terrible record of the crimes and miseries caused by the love of mortals for a senseless though beautiful stone, I felt the appropriateness of the institution in which we now were, and the wisdom of the people who had instituted it. Surely if these gems when set loose on earth caused such iniquity, the proper place for them was a prison where no individual could possess them. While they were open to all as a whole, they were available individually to none, and therefore they might do good, but could do no harm.
We examined hundreds of such specimens of beauty, each possessed of a sad history of crimes recorded on their pedestals. Gems that had adorned the profligate and the pure minded, the noble and the ignoble, the murderer and the murdered, the guilty and the innocent, there they were now confined in a prison. I said again, better far, that this should be as it is now, than be again as it was in my days.
