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To do all this, their surroundings must be favorable. And what should those surroundings be?

Without pretending that great improvements might not be suggested, the following description will give some idea of an institution where the necessary circumstances might be obtained:

1st, A comparatively large tract of land (from two hundred and fifty to five hundred acres), to allow of free out-of-door life without any communication with the outer world.

2d, A series of buildings, each to accommodate from fifteen to twenty-five women, and so arranged as to afford ample means of classification.

3d, These buildings to be under the charge of women officers. (4)

4th, The inmates to be trained in as many kinds of labor as possible, -- all household work, sewing, knitting, cooking, washing and ironing, inside the house; and outside, to work in gardens and greenhouses, to take care of cows, to be dairy-maids, &c.: the object being their improvement in every respect, and also their being finally fitted to support themselves by honest industry. (5)

5th, Besides this education in labor, their mental and moral faculties should be enlarged by constant teaching, -- a school being one of the main features of the Reformatory.

6th, The endeavor should also be made to restore the physical health of the women and they should be kept under the care of a physician of their own sex.

7th, The diversity of buildings would afford means of grading the inmates, and a transfer from one to another would mark a step in advance, or a temporary fall to a lower grade. By this means, the constant "I looking forward" necessary to a hopeful life would be obtained.

8th, The board of managers (which should be composed of both men and women) should have power to place out the women committed to their charge, in situations where their wages should belong to themselves, but where they would still be under guardianship and liable to recommitment to the Reformatory in case of ill conduct.

Under such a system, many of the women, who with our present jail and poorhouse education are doomed, might without doubt be rescued. They need to be saved from temptation (which assails them from within and without), and to be guided aright, and many of them will respond joyfully to the efforts for their improvement.

If, however, there were no hope of reforming even one of the thousand young women now beginning what may be a long life of degradation and woe, if the State owed no debt to those whom it has systematically crushed and imbruted from their earliest years, even then it would be the wisest economy to build houses for them, where they might be shut up from the present day till the day of their death. They will all live on the public in one way or another for the rest of their lives, many of them will continue to have children, and to cut off this baneful entail of degenerate propensities would be an economy, even though the term of guardianship ended only with the unhappy life itself. For self-protection, the State should care for these human beings who, having been born, must be supported to the end; but every motive of humanity, justice, and self-interest should lead to the extinction of the line so soon as possible. Even the weak State of Hawaii, in order to save its people from the contagion of a physical leprosy, has established an asylum for all who are tainted, on a separate island, to which all lepers of whatever rank are banished for life. Shall the State of New York suffer a moral leprosy to spread and taint her future generations, because she lacks the courage to set apart those who have inherited the deadly poison and who will hand it down to their children, even to the third and fourth generations?

Dr. Elisha Harris, in his introduction to the fearful history of "The Jukes," makes the following striking assertions:

"A departure downward from virtue to vice and crime is possible in the career of any youth, but the number of well-born and well-trained children who thus fall is exceedingly small. Habitual criminals spring almost exclusively from degenerating stocks; their youth is spent amid the degrading surroundings of physical and social defilement, with only a flickering of the redeeming influence of virtuous aspiration. The career of offenders so trained at last becomes a reckless warfare against society, and when the officers of justice overtake them and consign them to prisons, the habits of vicious thought and criminal action have acquired the strength and quality of instincts."