soner and a firmer resolve to dedicate all our energies to his salvation.

The following letter from ALFRED H. Love, of Philadelphia, was here read by the Clerk:

To the Progressive Friends at Their Thirty-Third Annual Meeting:

Regret I cannot accept your kind invitation to meet once more on the vitally consecrated soil of Longwood.

My thought on the subject of Prison Reform to which you have invited me, is:

Prisons will be built and there will be prisoners. Crime will be committed and there will be criminals.

How to prevent the one, and how to treat the latter, remains an enigma.

Build prisons but one story high and upon the Individual Separate System. Give plenty of light, sky-ward, and attach to each cell a small yard, into which admit the prisoners, at least an hour each day for exercise and the cultivation of plants. Sunlight and starlight, grass and flowers are ministers.

Start with the cardinal principles of reformation of the prisoner, protection to society and restitution for the wrong committed.

Employ every one, teach good paying and reputable trades. Give a partnership interest in the results of labor. Do not hire out the time and muscle of prisoners to contractors. Encourage sending out of a portion of the money earned by labor, beyond the task, to families and to those who suffered, because of the crime committed.

In case of murder, utilize the life and strength of the murderer to support the family that may have been deprived of its support.

It is the blindest economy, apart from all other considerations for the abolition of capital punishment, to put a murderer to death when he can be made useful.

Separate prisoners that they may not be known to each

other or to the public, that they may be more advantageously visited, and that they may read and think. Give them good company, it can be found in every community, and wherever there is a prison, let there be a Prison Society.

Shortening sentences for good behaviour is wise and in the line of premiums instead of penalties.

The day for punishment simply as vindictive punishment, it is hoped, has passed. Blot it out. Live in an atmosphere of encouragement. Instead of looking for the bad, try to find the good and where there is even a spark of righteousness, kindle it into brightness.

In free America the deprivation of liberty ought to be punishment enough.

If there be insubordination, take away one comfort or privilege after another, until there be a change, and then restore and increase them as there shall be reformation.

Hold up the life principle. It pays to be good. That makes a heaven for us all.

If the shortening of sentences for good behavior be wise, the abolition of all time sentences would be wiser. Treat crime as a disease and the criminal as a patient requiring treatment. Intelligent physicians will prescribe the remedy until recovery, and cease administering it when there is a cure.

We are all upon trial, but our emancipation and salvation or our incarceration, do not depend upon a law book.

As it is now, the judge turns to the book to see how many years he shall give for this crime or that, instead of looking into the dock and learning the birth, parentage, education and surroundings of the prisoner, and then sentencing for reformation, or until proper and safe for discharge.

Under the present system the prisoner watches the calendar and can claim liberty, when the term expires, even if there be no reformation and though boastful of revenge.

Such a prisoner is not fit to be discharged, more medicine is required. There is no cure.

On the other hand, the prisoner who may be thoroughly

and reliably penitent, determined to lead a correct life and make restitution for the wrong committed, who is earnest and diligent in his work and religiously inclined, should not be continued a prisoner, a tax upon the State, a loss to the community, a disadvantage to himself and a discouragement to the principle of reformation and hope. No more medicine is required. The remedy has effected a cure.

Over the doorway of the new prison in the city of Rome, Clement XI had inscribed these words: "It is idle to coerce the bad by punishment without making them better by instruction."

We should write over every cell door: This door is closed upon the bad but opens upon the good.

A Commission on Discharge composed of proper persons could readily manage this reformatory principle of penology. And when discharged? Here is the need of the age. Where to go, what to do, how to apply. There are difficulties. There is a partial sequel. Have a farm or a factory. Give the deserving discharged prisoners a chance. Let them earn a reference, or make them employers rather than employees. Give them tools-start them in business. It is at this point in life, "A friend in need,

Is a friend indeed."

Keep a correspondence with deserving discharged prisoners. The postal system can be made a reformatory agency.

Establish training and industrial schools instead of prisons, especially for children-never incarcerate a child!

Give woman more opportunities in prisons. Introduce the home life so far as giving prisoners the company of good people and supplying good books.

Do not demean the personal appearance by shaving the head and the like that is done in some States, but thanks to progressive Pennsylvania, keep the mirror, the bath, the frequent change of clothing, the knives and forks. Let the walls be decorated with beautiful pictures and encourage a correspondence between prisoners and their visitors. Solicit their

views upon prison discipline; draw out their best thoughts; elevate the manhood and womanhood of every one; exercise kindness and charity with firmness and with wisdom. Give every one a hearing, recognize that even prisoners have rights, and should suffer no imposition or cruelty. Hate the sin but love the sinner, and never forget that the Divine light is in each, and that, "In the image of God created He him."

Your assured friend,

Philadelphia, 6-mo. 2d., 1885.

ALFRED H. LOVE.

After a slight discussion participated in by Mr. REYNOLDS, J. WMS. THORNE. E. M. DAVIS, and J. STERNE, the subject of Temperance was taken up and the Chairman introduced Rev. Mr. COLLYER, who said :

Friends, I came to Longwood to-day to hear not to be heard. I did not come with any prepared speech to deliver to you, but I have been received with such unexpected cordiality and kindness, that I cannot fail to respond to your invitation to speak to you a little while on this subject. We may not agree upon Christian doctrine, but as to Christian and humanitarian labor we may. One reference has been made this afternoon to the cost of criminal reform, a question in which I am very much interested,and as my friend Mr. BULL was speaking, I thought that one of the best ways to stop the progress of the disease, is to ascertain its cause or causes and then try to remedy the evil. Now what are some of the manifest causes of crime in our country to-day? As I thought of them a moment ago, there are three: ignorance, idleness and intemperance, and of these perhaps the greatest is ignorance. Our public school system, in which we all feel a very great pride, has done much to remedy the first of these evils, and for a large number of boys and girls in our great cities who are running out in the streets when the schools are in session, we have provided schools for compulsory education. As for idleness, we know how that is. We have in some cases Industrial schools. I wish they would greatly multiply; they would teach our boys and girls some

useful employment, they would much lessen the number of inmates of our almshouses and jails. Then if we could do something to arrest the progress of intemperance we should do a great deal to promote Prison Reform, to protect society, to prevent crime and to reform the great criminal population of our land. The great question of the day, is the question of temperance. It is the moral issue that must be met. Some are ready to push it from them, they don't want to hear people speaking on the subject, but friends, the temperance subject has come and it has come to stay. There are good men and women here this afternoon, who as long as they live will be advocating the cause of temperance with all the earnestness of their souls. We have not been indifferent to this great evil that is desolating the land, or to the vast number who are coming down to drunkard's graves every year. It has been estimated that the number is no less than sixty thousand. Just think of that, an army of sixty thousand men in line, an army of drunkards with their broken bodies and bescarred faces going side by side to a drunkard's grave, bringing misery upon the homes of those who love them, and whom they in return ought to love. If we were to hear of a great epidemic in a city like Lancaster or Reading, that baffled the skill of the physicians, and saw one after another of the citizens falling, and in the course of a year all the inhabitants, men, women and children laid low in the grave, we would cry out, "What a pity; what a destruction of life; what a pity that no remedy can be found to check the progress of the disease;" and yet to think of it, a number equal to the inhabitants of one of those cities going down every year to drunkard's graves, because these graves are scattered so widely, so many of them unmarked by any tombstone, many over which no tear has been shed, because these graves are so widely scattered we do not realize the destruction of human life that is going on. And then think of the number of criminals that have been made criminals through the influence of rum.

Our judges have estimated that three-fourths of the crimi