ing "the quality of mercy," should deal with
firm hand and inexorable justice.

As our government is not so situated that penal colonies are
practicable, walled villages might be built with all the safeguards
which modern science and inventive skill can supply for the absolute and
permanent isolation of these "life criminals." In these penal villages,
various grades and classes should be placed each by itself. Behind these
never-opening gates, and under conditions that should relieve the world
at once and forever of their presence, these avowed and unrepentant
enemies of social and civil order should be compelled to "work out their
own salvation."

No great and costly prisons would be needed. Simple and inexpensive
cottages, each with its separate plot of ground, with furniture and
housekeeping arrangements on the most frugal scale, with absolute
necessaries in food and clothing, at least for a time, would be
required. The greatest possible liberty should be given to each
individual convict. The industrious should be assured of the full
benefit of their toil. Those who would not work, should find here the
same penalties for idleness as obtain in the world they had left. Here
might be gathered the whole round of industry--artisans, shops,
manufacturers of all kinds, aided by every appliance of modern
machinery. Schools, libraries, and even churches would by no means be
excluded from this life-convict home. There is no reason why such a
community of criminals might not ultimately become largely
self-supporting and self-governing. They could have their own courts,
their own lawyers, their own judges, their own system of penal law, and
their own machinery for its enforcement.

To each small company of men there should be allotted a cottage, which
they could call their own. As far as possible these men should be left
to themselves. The outworking of social and economic laws under such
conditions might sometimes be summary and savage, but it would
ultimately be salutary. Though for a while, save as it was held back by
the mailed hand of military power, crime might run riot, the instinct of
self-preservation would at last assert itself. The murderer does not
like to be murdered; the highway robber does not like to be robbed; all
classes of criminals object to taking their own medicine; and so it
would come about that, even out of elements the most incongruous and
unpromising, some form of social order would finally be evolv