atment of the guilty, better days are in
prospect.

What the traveller has to observe then is, first, whether there has been
any amelioration of the treatment of criminals in countries where the
people have a voice upon it: and, in countries despotically ruled,
whether public sentiment is moved about the condition of state
criminals, and whether men treat one another vindictively in their
appeals to the laws of citizenship: whether there is a Burmese cruelty
in the exercise of the legal rights of the creditor; whether there is a
reluctance to plunge others into the woes of legal penalties; or whether
offenders are considered as beyond the pale of sympathy. It may thus
appear whether the people entertain the pernicious notion that there is
a line drawn for human conduct, on one side of which all is virtue, and
on the other all vice; or whether they are approximating to the more
philosophical and genial belief that all wickedness is weakness and woe,
and that therefore the guilty need more care and tenderness in the
arrangement of the circumstances under which they live than those who
enjoy greater strength against temptation, and an ease of mind which
criminals can never know. In some parts of the United States this
general persuasion is remarkably evident, and is an incontestable proof
of the advanced state of morals there. In some prisons of the United
States, as much care is bestowed on the arrangements by which the guilty
are preserved from contaminating one another, are exposed to good
influences and precluded from bad, as in any infirmary on the
ventilation of the wards, and the diet and nursing of the sick. In such
a region, vindictiveness in social punishments must be going out, and
Christ-like views of human guilt and infirmity beginning to prevail.

The same conclusions may be drawn from an observation of the methods of
legal punishment. Recklessness of human life is one of the surest
symptoms of barbarism, whether life is taken by law or by assassination.
As men grow civilized, and learn to rate the spiritual higher and higher
above the physical life, human life grows sacred. The Turk orders off
the head of a slave almost without a serious thought. The New Zealanders
have murdered men by scores, to supply their dried and grinning heads to
English purchasers, who little imagined the cost at which they were
obtained. This is the way in which life is squandered in savage
societies. Up to a comparatively high poi