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"With other ministrations thou, O Nature,
Healest thy wandering and distempered child:
Thou pourest on him thy soft influences,
Thy sunny hues, fair forms, and breathing sweets,
Thy melodies of woods, and winds, and waters,
Till he relent, and can no more endure
To be a jarring and a dissonant thing
Amidst this general dance and minstrelsy."

Thus it is that the Christian idea of reformation, rather than revenge, is slowly but surely incorporating itself in our statute books. We have only to look back but a single century to be able to appreciate the immense gain for humanity in the treatment of criminals which has been secured in that space of time. Then the use of torture was common throughout Europe. Inability to comprehend and believe certain religious dogmas was a crime to be expiated by death, or confiscation of estate, or lingering imprisonment. Petty offences against property furnished subjects for the hangman. The stocks and the whipping post stood by the side of the meeting house. Tongues were bored with redhot irons and ears shorn off. The jails were loathsome dungeons, swarming with vermin, unventilated, unwarmed. A century and a half ago the populace of Massachusetts were convulsed with grim merriment at the writhings of a miserable woman scourged at the cart tail or strangling in the ducking stool; crowds hastened to enjoy the spectacle of an old man enduring the unutterable torment of the peine forte et dure -- pressed slowly to death under planks -- for refusing to plead to an indictment for witchcraft. What a change from all this to the opening of the State Reform School, to the humane regulations of prisons and peniten-tiaries, to keeneyed benevolence watching over the ad-ministration of justice, which, in securing society from lawless aggression, is not suffered to overlook the true interest and reformation of the criminal, nor to forget that the magistrate, in the words of the apostle, is to be indeed "the minister of God to man for good"!