one convicts, showed a loss that year, on the Contract System, of only eleven dollars. Missouri manages a convict population of the same size as that of Georgia, and boasts a cash profit on the Contract System. Indeed, the State prisons under the Lease System are, almost without exception, populous prisons, the average population among the whole twelve so governed being 920, while that of the thirty-three that exclude the system is but 560.

Another unfounded assumption is that the prisons working under the Contract or the Public Account System receive their inmates largely from the ranks of men skilled in trade. The truth is> the strongest argument in favor of teaching trades in prison lies in the fact that men -with trades keep out of prison, or appear there only in decided minorities, in any community; and prisons everywhere receive especially but few acquainted with the two or three or five or six skilled industries that happen to be carried on within their walls. It is assumed, again, that the great majority of the inmates of our leased prisons are not only without mechanical training, but without mechanical aptitude. Yet, in fact, there is quite enough skilled work taught to just this class in just these prisons to make void the argument. Within the walls of the Virginia State penitentiary in September, 1881, under the Contract System, tobacco, shoes, barrels and clothing were being made with a force of which three-fifths were black men. The whole force of the Maryland prison is engaged, within its walls, under contractors, in marble cutting and the manufacture of shoes, stoves and hollow iron-ware, and in November, 1881, consisted of five blacks to exery three whites, and of the entire number not one in ten was previously acquainted with any handicraft that could be of any service to him in any of these occupations.

Moreover, on the other hand, there is no leased prison that does not constantly receive a sufficient number of skilled convicts, both white and black, to constitute a good teaching force for the training of the unskilled. The Texas penitentiary, in 1880, had on its rolls 39 workers in wood, 20 in leather, 50 in metals and machinery, 20 in stone and brick, 7 engravers and printers, and 11 painters.

The leased prisons, as it happens, have one decided advantage in this res:ard;the high average term of sentences affords an unusual opportunity for training the convicts to skilled labor, and making the best use, both pecuniary and reformatory, of their occupations. The South Carolina penitentiary is probably an exception; and yet it is in this prison that the manufacture of shoes, say its officers, might easily be carried on with cash profit. In the Georgia penitentiary, in 1880, there were 87 sentenced for life; 104 for terms above ten years and less than twenty; 101 for twenty years; 10 for higher terms up to forty years, and only 22 for as low a term as one year — in a total of 1185 inmates. In the Texas State prison, in October, 1882, with a population of 2378, only two were under sentences of less than two years' length.* To increase the advantage, the long sentences fall with special frequency upon the class that is assumed to require an undue length of training. In the Georgia convict force just noted, for instance, only 15 were whites among the 215 under sentences above ten years.

But why need we linger to show that there is ample opportunity in these prisons to teach the inmates trades, if only the system were such as to permit it? The choice of a better system does not rest upon this. In the Contract and Public Account prisons, it is not at all the universal practice to make the unskilled convict acquainted with a trade. This is done only in a few prisons. Generally — much too generally — he is set to some simple task, some minute fraction of the work of manufacturing some article, a task that he learns to do at most in a few days, becomes skillful in within a few weeks, and continues to do unceasingly from the beginning of his imprisonment to the day of his discharge. He works a lever or pedal that drives pegs into a shoe; or he turns down or up the rims of hats, or varnishes the heels of innumerable boots, or turns a small wheel that bottoms countless tin cans. He is employed according to his physical strength and his intelligence. It is no small misfortune to society that such industries leave the convict at last without a trade; but, comparing them with the tasks of the lessees' camps, it may be said they do not murder him, nor torture him, but are to those tasks what light is to darkness.

After all, these objections to the abandonment of the Lease System, even if they were otherwise well grounded, would fail at last when it comes to be seen that the system does not make good even its one poor profession; it does not, even pecuniarily, "pay." In flush times it hands in a few thousands — sometimes even a few ten thousands — annually, into the State treasury. But its

* Some idea of the ferocity of these sentences may be got from the fact that 509 of these Texas convicts were under twenty years of age. history is a long record of discoveries and rediscoveries on the part of the State that she has been the losing party in a game of confidence, with nobody to blame but herself. How much has thus been lost morally, baffles estimation; suffice it to say, enough ungodly gains have gone into the hands of lessees to have put every leased prison in the country upon a firm basis under Public Account. Every system is liable to mismanagement, but thei e are systems under which mismanagement is without excuse and may be impeached and punished. The Lease System is itself the most atrocious mismanagement. It is in its very nature dishonorable to the community that knowingly tolerates it, and in its practical workings needs only to be known to be abhorred and cast out. It exists to-day, in the twelve American commonwealths where it is found, because the people do not know what they are tolerating.

But is there any need for them longer to be unaware of it? There is none. Nor is there any need that the system should continue. We have heard one, who could give no other excuse, urge the unfavorableness of the southern climate to prison confinement. But what have the reports of prisons in this climate shown us? That the mortality outside, among the prisoners selected (as is pretended at least) for their health and strength, is twice and thrice and sometimes four and five times as great as among the feebler sort left within the walls. True, some of the leases still have many years to run. What of it? Shall it be supinely taken for granted that there is no honorable way out of these brutal and wicked compacts? There is no honorable way to remain under them. There are many just ways to be rid of them.

Let the terms of these leases themselves condemn their holders. There is no reasonable doubt that, in many states, the lessees will be found to have committed acts distinctly forfeiting their rights under these instruments. Moreover, with all their, looseness, these leases carry conditions which, if construed as common humanity and the tumor of the state demand, will make the leases intolerable to men whose profits are coined from the flesh and blood of human beings. It is safe to say there is not a lessee in the twelve convict-leasing states who, were he but held to account for the excesses in his deathroll, beyond those of prisons elsewhere in enlightened countries, would not throw up his unclean hands in a moment and surrender to decency, honesty, humanity and the public welfare. But we waste words. No holder of these compacts need be driven to close quarters in order that, by new constraints, they may be made to become void. They are void already. For, by self evidence, the very principles upon which they were founded are contra bonos mores; and though fifty legistures had decreed it, not one such covenant can show cause why the seal of the commonwealth and the signatures of her officers should n6t be torn from it, and one of the most solemn of all public trusts returned to those official hands that, before God, the world, and the State, have no right to part with it.

The Chairman: It is said of the Apostle Paul that when he was upon his journey to Damascus he thought within himself that he was verily doing God a service; and I am inclined to think from the correspondence I have had with the friends and advocates of the Lessee System in the south, that they think very much the same way. I hope that when they see Mr. Cable's paper they will, like the Apostle, see a great light.

The system is so backed by political and financial power in the south that it requires a man of courage and conviction to take a stand against it. I compliment Mr. Cable for the ability and fidelity to principle evinced in the paper to which we have listened with such absorbing interest.

Gov. Anderson, of Kentucky: I feel like making a few remarks under the extraordinary pressure of these most extraordinary facts, which have been presented by Mr. Cable to-night. Mr. Cable's statement is a summary of public official reports from Governors down to wardens, and they are all alike. He did not mention a case where there could be any doubt.' Every statement that he made was quoted from the reports of officials against whom they bear. As a Kentucky man, and I am a Kentuckian of Kentuckians, I am proud of her people and of our state; but, I do say that in our institutions here, there are cruelties even more infamous, and abuses greater than have been mentioned by the gentlemen. What right has any state or government, standing in loco parentis as they call it, to take charge of a man's life and practice the cruelties of which we have heard this evening, and which many of us know to be true? As for myself, I formally deny, for example, the right legal or equitable, of any government whatever, to take the life of a state prisoner, for attempting to escape. Prisoners of war, make another and a very different question. The prisoner has a natural right — often a just right — to escape if he can. It is the state's duty to detain him by walls, guards, pursuits and recaptures, but not to deprive him of his life, except alone "in due course of law and by the judgment of his peers." If, then, the state be without this legislative power, by what possible license can she depute this awful franchise to the sudden whim or passion of a single hireling, perhaps a drunken guard?" But we of the south, sir, do yet worse. By our contract system we violate our own state law, and the sentences of the court, condemning these wretches "in due course of laiv" to the forfeiture of their liberties. .And we hand them over to be "guarded" in plain, open view the air and forest, breathing only of liberty and happiness — we tempt them by the strongest possible solicitations and opportunities to escape — and then, we say to a more private man, without a scrap of state warrant, and actuated solely by the sheer greed of avarice, an avarice equal (to say the least quite equal) in amount, to any that ever actutaed the bestriped thieves and burglars in the whole line of convicts; "we, of the south," noted for our kind-heartedness all over the world — we say to these hirelings of private contragt-avarice or cruelty: "There they march outside of walls, on the highway, in the open air, with the woods in sight, tempted as they are to fly, yet, if they fly, shoot them dead in their tracks." True, you have no warrant or commission of any sort,— it will be without law and against all law, from Magna charta down*