In a former part of this work, I have expressed a somewhat unfavorable opinion on “the separate system,” adopted in the Philadelphia Penitentiary.  One of my objections to this system is this, that to deprive man so entirely of human society, is to do violence to the strongest instinct of his nature, and thereby to inflict suffering far more severe than corporeal pain or privation.  If the severity of this system does not obviously tend to carry out the legitimate objects of prison discipline, it cannot be defended.  The small number of recommittals is no proof of the efficacy of this system; since, in a country like the United States, a liberated felon may very easily choose another locality for his sphere of action.  In favor of the “separate system,” it is occasionally pleaded that the prisoner is under a veil of secresy; and that when he goes forth, neither the censorious public, nor his fellow-prisoners, can point him out; and thus, his character being comparatively unblemished, he can, with less difficulty, procure employment.  It is obvious that this would induce, in many cases, a degree of dishonest concealment from an employer, and encourage dissimulation.  It would be much better that the prisoner should depend for a situation on the good character which the superintendent would give him if reformed; and I was glad to find at Sing Sing guarded situations had been procured, in numerous instances, for the liberated prisoners, and that their employers, with very little exception, represented them to be most valuable servants.  I could hear of no case, in either of the prisons I visited, of any permanent injury to the health of a prisoner from the entire disuse of intoxicating drinks, however intemperate their previous habits might have been.  The same remark is true with regard to tobacco.  I will only add, that it is notorious that the prison discipline of Great Britain, notwithstanding all its recent improvements, is yet lamentably deficient; and that though the United States justly claim precedence of us in this respect, they have, by no means reached perfection.  The greatest deficiency of all, however, in each nation, is that of institutions like the Philadelphia Refuge, co-extensive with the wants of the community, for the reformation of juvenile delinquency; thus suppressing crime in its small beginnings.  So long as this want is unsupplied, and the juvenile offender is contaminated by contact with the hardened criminal, the statesmen and those who control the legislatures of both countries, dishonor their profession of Christianity.

On the 26th, I accompanied my friends, J. and M. Candler, to the steamer which was to convey them on board the “Roscius” packet, to sail for Liverpool this afternoon.  I afterwards called upon Charles Collins, who, for many years past, has dealt exclusively in articles of free labor produce, and for which he said he had found the demand to increase of late.  I am more and more convinced that this branch of the