rk.

I visited the State prison at Jackson, and addressed seven hundred men
and boys, ranging from seventy down to seventeen years of age. Seated on
the dais with the chaplain, I saw them file in to dinner, and, while
they were eating, I had an opportunity to study the sad, despairing
faces before me. I shall never forget the hopeless expression of one
young man, who had just been sentenced for twenty years, nor how ashamed
I felt that one of my own sex, trifling with two lovers, had fanned the
jealousy of one against the other, until the tragedy ended in the death
of one and the almost lifelong imprisonment of the other. If girls
should be truthful and transparent in any relations in life, surely it
is in those of love, involving the strongest passions of which human
nature is capable. As the chaplain told me the sad story, and I noticed
the prisoner's refined face and well-shaped head, I felt that the young
man was not under the right influences to learn the lesson he needed.
Fear, coercion, punishment, are the masculine remedies for moral
weakness, but statistics show their failure for centuries. Why not
change the system and try the education of the moral and intellectual
faculties, cheerful surroundings, inspiring influences? Everything in
our present system tends to lower the physical vitality, the
self-respect, the moral tone, and to harden instead of reforming the
criminal.

My heart was so heavy I did not know what to say to such an assembly of
the miserable. I asked the chaplain what I should say. "Just what you
please," he replied. Thinking they had probably heard enough of their
sins, their souls, and the plan of salvation, I thought I would give
them the news of the day. So I told them about the woman suffrage
amendment, what I was doing in the State, my amusing encounters with
opponents, their arguments, my answers. I told them of the great changes
that would be effected in prison life when the mothers of the nation had
a voice in the buildings and discipline. I told them what Governor
Bagley said, and of the good time coming when prisons would no longer be
places of punishment but schools of reformation. To show them what women
would do to realize this beautiful dream, I told them of Elizabeth Fry
and Dorothea L. Dix, of Mrs. Farnham's experiment at Sing Sing, and
Louise Michel's in New Caledonia, and, in closing, I said: "Now I want
all of you who are in favor of the amendment to hold up your right
han