especially when our trades are overstocked.  They, therefore, by contracting new debts, must return again into prison, or, how honest soever their dispositions may be, by idleness and necessity will be forced into bad courses, such as begging, cheating, or robbing.  These, then, likewise, are useless to the state; not only so, but dangerous.  But these (it will be said) may be serviceable by their labor in the country.  To force them to it, I am afraid, is impracticable; to suppose they will voluntarily do it, I am sure is unlikely.  The Colony of Georgia will be a proper asylum for these.  This will make the act of parliament of more effect.  Here they will have the best motive for industry; a possession of their own, and no possibility of subsisting without it.

“I have heard it said that our prisons are the properest places for those that are thrown into them, by keeping them from being hurtful to others.  Surely this way of thinking is something too severe.  Are these people, with their liberty to lose our compassion?  Are they to be shut up from our eyes, and excluded also from our hearts?  Many of very honest dispositions fall into decay, nay, perhaps, because they are so, because they cannot allow themselves that latitude which others take to be successful.  The ways that lead to a man’s ruin are various.  Some are undone by overtrading, others by want of trade; many by being responsible for others.  Do all these deserve such hardship?  If a man sees a friend, a brother, a father going to a prison, where felons are to be his society, want and sickness his sure attendants, and death, in all likelihood his only, but quick relief; if he stretches out his hand to save him from immediate slavery and ruin, he runs the risk of his own liberty, and at last loses it; is there any one who will say, this man is not an object of compassion?  Not so, but of esteem, and worth preserving for his virtue.  But supposing that idleness and intemperance are the usual cause of his ruin.  Are these crimes adequate to such a punishment as confinement for life?  But even yet granting that these unhappy people deserve no indulgence, it is certainly imprudent in any state to lose the benefit of the labor of so many thousands.

“But the public loss, by throwing men into prison, is not confined to them only.  They have many of them wives and children.  These are, also, involved in their ruin.  Being destitute of a support, they must perish, or else become a burden on their parishes by an inability to work, or a nuisance by their thefts.  These, too, are useless to society.