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To begin at the beginning, what right had we to permit them to be born of parents who were depraved in body and mind? What right have we to-day to allow men and women who are diseased and vicious to reproduce their kind, and bring into the world beings whose existence must be one long misery to themselves and others? We do not hesitate to cut off, where it is possible, the entail of insanity by incarcerating for life the incurably insane: why should we not also prevent the transmission of moral insanity, as fatal as that of the mind?

Again, what right had we to leave these unhappy children to be reared in poorhouses, shut off from all that was good and pure, surrounded by all that was low and evil? The State of New York has at last awakened to the direful result of that negligence, (3) but none too soon, as the above records show; and even now, incredible as it may appear, there are men in the State (men, too, who have personal knowledge of the very facts which to us appear so appalling) who are ready to condemn helpless children to a lifelong pauperism by repealing the law of 1875, and to rear them in poorhouses, simply because it costs "the county" a few cents more a day to give them such a home as will save them from that misery. The calculation that forty or fifty years of dependence, even if the cost each year be reduced to seventy-five or eighty dollars, is more expensive to "the county" than four or five years at one hundred dollars a year, seems never to be made. The question of what duty the community owes to each of its members is certainly never considered.

Leaving, however, all consideration of duty, and looking only at the right of society, the community, which has to bear all the burden of the support of these maimed and crippled bodies and souls, has certainly a right to protect itself, so far as may be, against the indefinite increase of the weight of this burden. In self-defence, the working part of mankind may say to those whom they support by their work, "You yourselves we are prepared to save from starvation by the hard toil of our hands and brains, but you shall not add a single person besides yourselves to the weight we have to carry. You shall not entail upon us and our children the further duty of keeping your children alive in idleness and sin."

These men and women are now constantly maintained by the public, sometimes for years at a time in the same institution, sometimes continually changing from one to another, but never failing to demand a support from their fellows. Why, then, should they not be maintained in institutions fitted to save them from their own weaknesses and vices, where in due time they may be formed anew in body and mind, and be ready to enter the ranks of free and intelligent men and women? Why should they not spend years, if necessary, in institutions described by Gov. Haines of New Jersey in the following words: "Preventive and reformatory institutions are not to be regarded as places of punishment, but as schools of correctional education.. . . In them the ignorant are taught, the vicious restrained, the desponding cheered, the hopeful encouraged. In them industry becomes habitual, and good citizens are made of those who would otherwise become pests of society, following their own evil propensities, or becoming the victims of more practised and designing offenders." Surely no argument based on the right of men to liberty can have weight against such a proposal; nor, again, can any argument of "economy" be for a moment listened to. It is not "economy" to allow an evil to grow and grow to terrifying dimensions, whatever may be the cost of crushing it out at the present time.

The words of Dr. Elisha Harris, Corresponding Secretary of the New York Prison Association, speaking of a prison for women (in the Thirty-second Annual Report of the Association), are most applicable: "Until the State shall have provided a prison and a reformatory refuge for criminal females, and until every county and city has more suitable places of detention for women than the present common jail, most of those who suffer arrest and conviction for crimes will become destroyers and injurers for their lifetime. It must be remembered that hope cannot be extinguished in any mind without hazard to society itself, and that, if smothered and blotted out in a female offender, her life thenceforward will cost the people vastly more when she is free from prison than when in, however great the expenses of the prison for women."