ados to make arable and
habitable, I think! We must stick by it, however;--of all enterprises
the impossiblest is that of getting out of it, and shifting into
another. To work, then, one and all; hands to work!

No. II. MODEL PRISONS. [March 1, 1850.]

The deranged condition of our affairs is a universal topic among men at
present; and the heavy miseries pressing, in their rudest shape, on the
great dumb inarticulate class, and from this, by a sure law, spreading
upwards, in a less palpable but not less certain and perhaps still more
fatal shape on all classes to the very highest, are admitted everywhere
to be great, increasing and now almost unendurable. How to diminish
them,--this is every man's question. For in fact they do imperatively
need diminution; and unless they can be diminished, there are many other
things that cannot very long continue to exist beside them. A serious
question indeed, How to diminish them!

Among the articulate classes, as they may be called, there are two ways
of proceeding in regard to this. One large body of the intelligent
and influential, busied mainly in personal affairs, accepts the social
iniquities, or whatever you may call them, and the miseries consequent
thereupon; accepts them, admits them to be extremely miserable,
pronounces them entirely inevitable, incurable except by Heaven, and
eats its pudding with as little thought of them as possible. Not a very
noble class of citizens these; not a very hopeful or salutary method of
dealing with social iniquities this of theirs, however it may answer in
respect to themselves and their personal affairs! But now there is the
select small minority, in whom some sentiment of public spirit and human
pity still survives, among whom, or not anywhere, the Good Cause may
expect to find soldiers and servants: their method of proceeding, in
these times, is also very strange. They embark in the "philanthropic
movement;" they calculate that the miseries of the world can be cured by
bringing the philanthropic movement to bear on them. To universal public
misery, and universal neglect of the clearest public duties, let private
charity superadd itself: there will thus be some balance restored, and
maintained again; thus,--or by what conceivable method? On these terms
they, for their part, embark in the sacred cause; resolute to cure a
world's woes by rose-water; desperately bent on trying to the uttermost
that mild method. It seems not to have