temptation, and without premeditated purpose of crime? how many from ignorance? how many for want of a friendly hand, an encouraging word to aid their flight from evil? how many for the absence of those checks and motives, which from childhood have been enforced upon us? Human justice cannot take cognizance of all these unexplained causes, and shadowy palliations, which are bound up with secret, unspoken thought. They are the province alone of Him who "weigheth the spirits."
Yet we know that these men on whom society has set its seal of reprobation, had once a mother to whom their infancy was dear; who would have shuddered with agony, had the vision of a felon's cell risen up between her and the cradle whose quiet slumber she watched. Under the influence of such thoughts, it it peculiarly painful to see the abject countenances of the prisoners, and to imagine that you trace in them a destitution of those hopes and feelings, which might brighten their period of suffering, with the hope of reformation.
A great proportion of them are foreigners. The poverty and vices of an Older World, precipitate themselves upon the New, with a fearful freedom. To furnish a poor-house for the decrepit of other realms, might be accomplished in our broad land of plenty; but to be a Botany Bay for their criminals, is a more revolting and perilous office. Could our own superflux of virtue be relied on to neutralize this mass of