Criminals in this country, when the law took hold of them, used to be turned over to the care of men who often had more sympathy with the crime than with the criminal, or at least to those who were almost as coarse in feeling and as brutal in speech as their charges.  There have been some changes of late years in the care of criminals, but does public opinion yet everywhere demand that jailers and prison-keepers and executioners of the penal law should be men of refinement, of high character, of any degree of culture?  I do not know any class more needing the best direct personal influence of the best civilization than the criminal.  The problem of its proper treatment and reformation is one of the most pressing, and it needs practically the aid of our best men and women.  I should have great hope of any prison establishment at the head of which was a gentleman of fine education, the purest tastes, the most elevated morality and lively sympathy with men as such, provided he had also will and the power of command.  I do not know what might not be done for the viciously inclined and the transgressors, if they could come under the influence of refined men and women.  And yet you know that a boy or a girl may be arrested for crime, and pass from officer to keeper, and jailer to warden, and spend years in a career of vice and imprisonment, and never once see any man or woman, officially, who has tastes, or sympathies, or aspirations much above that vulgar level whence the criminals came.  Anybody who is honest and vigilant is considered good enough to take charge of prison birds.

The age is merciful and abounds in charities-houses of refuge for poor women, societies for the conservation of the exposed and the reclamation of the lost.  It is willing to pay liberally for their support, and to hire ministers and distributors of its benefactions.  But it is beginning to see that it cannot hire the distribution of love, nor buy brotherly feeling.  The most encouraging thing I have seen lately is an experiment in one of our cities.  In the thick of the town the ladies of the city have furnished and opened a reading-room, sewing-room, conversation-room, or what not, where young girls, who work for a living and have no opportunity for any culture, at home or elsewhere, may spend their evenings.  They meet there always some of the ladies I have spoken of, whose unostentatious duty and pleasure it is to pass the evening with them, in reading or music or the use of the needle, and the exchange of the courtesies of life in conversation.  Whatever grace and kindness and refinement of manner they carry there, I do not suppose are wasted.  These are some of the ways in which culture can serve men.  And I take it that one of the chief evidences of our progress in this century is the recognition of the truth that there is no selfishness so supreme—­not even that in the possession of wealth—­as that which retires into itself with all the accomplishments