by day. Recklessness may supervene, which leads, probably, some of the family into crime and infamy; or the misery may simply be borne, with some relief through frequent removals, only to incur the same in each succeeding neighborhood. A woman said to me, "It has followed us wherever we have gone; not a person before has come to talk kindly to me, and only the other day a neighbor called and said she wished I would keep my children in; she did not wish hers to play with them, for reasons which she presumed she need not name," and she added, "I don't know what to do."

THEY ARE GENERALLY POOR.

Add to all this the common element of poverty. Before the crime they were generally poor, their possessions scant, their income small, and, probably, heavily taxed for the benefit of the saloon. But now their support is gone. The care of the family comes upon the worse than widowed wife and mother, while the boys and girls must work or beg to aid her.

THEIR FALL IS EASY.

Their new sorrows, toils and associations, often most unavoidably open the way for the downfall of some other member of the comparatively helpless family. The confirmation of this frequently comes from the lips of young criminals of each sex. The death, instead of the imprisonment of the criminal, would, in many cases, be a mercy to the home. A convict with whom I was once conversing, whose family I had learned was living not far from my own, when I asked him how his wife supported herself, burst into sobs, and replied, "God only knows, sir; just read her last letter." It was not a kindly letter, because she had to tell him of her starving condition. Being then on my way for an absence from home, I telegraphed a lady where she would find the suffering woman, and asked her to be quick with relief. The developments are a fitting comment on my question. She was in a tenement house, third story, on a hall each side of which were living rooms, with a babe seven months old, with not a stick or shred of furniture in her only bare room, excepting a sofa so in pieces that it could not be sold. The woman, barefoot, had supported herself for days by watching until the hall was quiet and then slipping to a garbage barrel under a stairway for such bits as her miserable neighbors had thrown away, which she had cleaned from sweepings

and ashes, and eaten. She had no friends, and could obtain no employment. She would not telegraph her respectable family in New York State, because she did not want them to know of her disgrace. And here, in this century, in a town of ten thousand inhabitants, she was found sick and starving, with a dozen churchbells ringing lustily in her ears, and the clatter of Christian commerce about the walls of her worse than prison.

SMALL FAMILIES NOT SAFE.

At this juncture we are able to give notice to a curious feature of statistics which is almost a relief. That which is evidently a cause, seems to mitigate the effects, viz: the families of prisoners are generally not large. The convict may be the father of quite a number of children, though this is said to be unusual, but it is noticeably the case that the average convict has but few brothers and sisters. It is believed that if more extensive statistics could be obtained touching this matter, it would be shown that large families minister very sparingly to the number of prisoners. Careful observers have become accustomed to ask criminals of their brothers and sisters, and accustomed to note that the number is very small, indeed. There may be some very plain reasons for this. If the family be large, there is ordinarily the restraint of rigid industry and economy on the part of parents, and also the training of the children in like wholesome principles. The temptations are far lessened for the boy to meet evil among associates in the evening and upon the streets. The home makes more of a society; the number is large enough to maintain fitting pastimes; variety of ages increases the range of entertainments, and the restraints are also far greater on account of the number to be involved in the sorrow of the possible crime. A boy, with a dozen or so of brothers and sisters, is environed with so much that is interesting and protective on the one hand, and held with so strong a barrier to be broken over into vice on the other, that he is certainly safer than one who has none, or only one or two companions at home. The lives of parents in the large family are more exercised in the out-goings of home joys, calculated to develop in the children good tendencies, and to shield them from the evil. It is likely to become an important exhibit that there is a natural relation between the decrease of large families and the increase of criminals.

FAMILIES WHO RECEIVE THE RELEASED CRIMINAL.

Many of the families who seriously need the help which I am here to urge, have already received the criminal back again. The restoration, or return, is not without some good, and some joy. But the family is by no means reinstated to its former condition. Employment and income continue seriously precarious when more expected disgrace and discouragement continue. When the time has come which ends the term of prison life, and the warden says to the convict, "you are free today," is he free? Can he find employment as of old? Is he free to choose associates? He could not, while in prison, roam hither and thither on any quest, because the walls prevented. But on coming out of prison he finds another set of walls. He did not half dream that his family had felt these walls all through his term. He was then walled in, but he is now walled out. Destitute and pitiable as was the home while he was a convict, in many instances it is scarcely less so when the convict returns to its miseries. His very appearance renews the old disgrace and confirms much of the present severity, so long and so faithfully attempted to be lived down, and he feels keenly the walls that have been built against society, or against his home on the line of society, on the line of business and employment, and the sting of being a marked man pierces him sharply. One said to me during his third term in prison, "I tried my best, sir; I wouldn't drink, I did all I could to escape the old companions, I thought I should build up again, but I found my family all racked to pieces, no decent person wanted to have anything to do with me, but eyed and shrugged about me until I just thought that if the world wouldn't give me a chance to earn an honest living, I had no way but to take it."

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I know a young man from a respectable family whose widowed mother had anxiously awaited his return from two years in prison. She was much reduced in circumstances, and his labor was a necessity. After being turned away at every application for several months, he obtained employment at low wages forty miles from home on a farm, and gave the best satisfaction for nearly a month, when one day his employer suddenly charged him with imposing upon him as a prison-bird, paid him, and told him to clear out. He went to town, hired a livery horse to drive eight miles, saying he would return the next morning. He drove to a

town thirty miles away, sold the horse and buggy the next morning for one hundred dollars, and, without attempting to escape, was arrested, confessed the crime, and when afterwards asked by the judge why he had been so careless and open-handed about the whole matter, replied, with tears, that he only wanted to get his old home in the prison back again, the only place for him, he said, on earth.

MANY YOUTH INVOLVED.

A sad matter about these smirched families is, that so many, both the offenders and those dependent upon them, are very young; their years before them, which, uncared for, will almost surely be years of crime and wretchedness. The young criminal comes from the first short term back to his mother's home, with his pride gone, his reputation blasted, aspirations impossible, and he is probably a life criminal to prey upon society, to be guarded and supported at the public charge. Who made him such a hardened character? Surely not his first steps in wrong-doing. Who blasts the hope of rebuilding the life and the home when once it is shocked by the first crime? Shall we say that it is the negligence of our Christian civilization?

OUR DUTY IN THE MATTER.

In view of these conditions entailing upon so large a class of our fellow-citizens, I may be allowed to suggest something in the way of our duty. There is no very distinct consciousness among the masses of our people that we have anything to do about it. The average number of persons in our counties who have any benevolent interest whatever in the families which suffer in the directions set forth, is surprisingly and painfully small.

MANY SUFFER WHO ARE INNOCENT.

There are some very plain principles which a wise philanthropy must consider. Four out of five of all these persons are not criminals held guilty before the law of any wrong-doing whatever. They have simply been found in bad company in their own families, and this only at the time wherein the badness was first fully disclosed. They are bruised, many of them, as suddenly and as unexpectedly as though hit by a falling limb. They ought not to bear the blame of the misfortune that is upon them. Their trouble, in large part, consists in the attitude of society toward them, an

unwarranted and an unchristian attitude. The old theory yet prevails that vengeance belongs to men, but it is a blind work to mete it out upon innocent parties.

SOCIETY HURTS ITSELF BY NEGLECT.

And it can furthermore be clearly shown, that the exercise of the sentiment of vengeance on the part of the community against the wrongdoers, will surely redound to the hurt of the community. We are learning that it is far better to help a bad man to be better than to compel him to be worse. There is no community that is not open to receive, and that in reality does not receive to itself, persons who have been criminals, but are now neighbors with like passions as other residents, and the question is, whether residents in a community are worth more to the community when frowned on, pushed aside, and constantly hurt, or when helped; to be hopeless, or to suffer constant discouragement; having suffered the sentence of the law, to be now absolved from crime, or to be compelled to suffer another and a worse sentence, somewhat vague in its utterance, but really meted out by a remorseless community. The question is, whether a man and his family is worth more to the community to be educated in the community, or to be crushed and hunted down, and deprived of the thousand helps that tend to make good and prosperous citizens; whether a community is safer to crowd and exasperate a class already confessedly weak and dangerous, or to lend a hand and help them from the danger of being violent and revengeful, ignorant and reckless; whether it is better that a shattered home and a shattered character be rebuilt, and made an ornament and a delight, or be jostled about, and undermined until it can but fall. An enlightened philanthropy will not fail to return proper and prompt answers to such questions as these, and as to Christianity, its followers must certainly be ready to visit those who are in prisons, to heal the broken-hearted, and to set at liberty those who reside in these bruised homes. The great missionary enterprises have none too much attention bestowed upon them, but the heathen and the sinful about our very doors, who gather, hungry for life, for better life, must surely not be overlooked.

OUR JAILS.

The jail stands first in the line of response to these obvious and urgent demands. That is the first word that thrills the home with