ular indignation against crime.

In the classification of offenders and their assignment to different
penal villages, there would, no doubt, be some so atrociously and
fiendishly criminal that it would be a cruelty to others and a mistaken
kindness to them to permit them ever to go beyond their present prison
walls. By the plan suggested, the penitentiaries in most of the States,
now so crowded, while being relieved of a large part of their present
tenants, could still be utilized for the confinement of these pariahs of
crime.

Of course, in the working out of the plan suggested, there is abundant
room for all the skill and wisdom which past history and modern
experience can supply. Whether this or some better method shall finally
prevail depends on so many uncalculated and incalculable contingencies,
that he would be a very venturesome prophet who should attempt to
forecast the future. It does not, however, seem reasonable that, in all
the upheavals of modern thought, the questioning of old methods, and the
suggestions of new and better ones, which these final years of the
century are bringing, the treatment of the criminal classes shall be the
one question that defies solution, or that the new aeon which is soon to
open shall find us still bound to a system which is confessedly a
failure. Is it too much to hope that we can greet the opening of the
twentieth century with a lustrum of prison reform, which shall bring at
once the noblest mercy to the criminal, combined with absolute
protection to society from its most avowed and most persistent foes?

HOW TO INCREASE NATIONAL WEALTH BY THE EMPLOYMENT OF PARALYZED INDUSTRY.

BY B. O. FLOWER.

It is right and necessary that all men should have work to do which
shall be worth doing and which should be done under such conditions
as would make it neither over-wearisome nor over-anxious. Turn this
claim about as I may, think of it as long as I can, I cannot find
that it is an exorbitant claim.--_William Morris._

On the 18th of last May, while in a small restaurant on Fifth Avenue, in
Chicago, my attention was attracted by a large number of men who had
congregated on both sides of the street in front of the office of the
Chicago _Daily News_. In answer to my inquiry, a gentleman at my side
explained that these men were waiting to see the "Want" column of the
_News_, in the hope of being able to secure work. "It is an old, old
story," he con