Horatio Seymour

“ It is a mistake when we hold that criminals are merely perverse men, who are at war with social influences. On the other hand, they are the outgrowth of these influences. Crimes always take the hues and aspect of the country in which they are committed. They show not only guilty men but a guilty people. The world holds those nations to be debased where crime abounds. ”

“ It is the admiration of wealth, no matter how gained, which incites and emboldens the desperate speculator in commercial centres to sport with the sacred interests of labor, to unsettle the business of honest industry, by playing tricks with the standards of value. Those who use the stocks of great corporations as machines for gambling schemes are more deliberately and artfully dishonest than the more humble swindler who throws his loaded dice. ”

“ Surrounded by glittering objects within their reach, our servant-girls resist more temptations than any other class in society. We must look beyond the accidents of knowledge or ignorance if we wish to learn the springs of action. To check vice, there must be high moral standards in the public mind. The American mind must move upon a higher plane. To reform convicts, their hopes must be aroused and their better instincts worked upon. I never yet found a man so untamable that there was not something of good upon which to build a hope. ”

“ I am glad to state a fact which in some degree palliates the disgrace which attaches to the administration of justice and the conduct of public affairs in that great city, but I should fall short of telling the truth if I did not also say that the discredit of that great city mainly springs from the sad fact that its men of wealth as a body lack that genuine self-respect which leads to a faithful, high-minded performance of the duties each citizen owes to the public. ”

“ If we find that crimes are in a large degree the hot-bed growth of social influences; if the weakness of human nature is always open to their attacks; if they may at any time enter into our homes and strike at our family—then we must at least guard against them as we do the pestilence. To protect the public health and to learn the laws of life, we build and sustain with liberal hand hospitals where the sick and wounded can be cured. The moral hospital should be regarded with an equal interest. ”

“ I never yet found a man so good that he need not fear a fall. Through the warp and woof of the worst man's character there run some threads of gold. In the best there are base materials. It is this web of entwined good and evil in men's character which marks the problems and perplexities of the Legislature and judge, while there is no honest dealing with this subject unless the American people are charged with their share of guilt; and, while Christian charity leads us to take the kindest view we can of every man, it does not follow that crime should be dealt with in a feeble way. ”

“ As a rule, wrong-doing is the growth of influences pervading the social system, as pestilences are bred by malaria. Our study into this subject soon teaches us that prisons are moral hospitals where moral diseases are not only cared for, but science learns the moral laws of life—where it learns what endangers the general welfare of the community, what insidious, pestilential vapors permeate society, carrying moral disease and death into its homes. Prisoners are men like ourselves, and if we would learn the dangers which lurk in our pathways we must learn how they stumbled and fell. ”

“ The prisons, to which all vice tends, are the points from which the reform can be best urged which seeks to find out where vice begins. Starting from the sad ends of crime and running back along the tracks, it is seen that in a large degree they are engendered by public tastes, habits, and demoralizations. It is in our prisons we can best learn the corrupting influences about us which lead the weak as well as the wicked astray, ay, and sometimes make the strong man fall into disgrace and misery. ”

“ The public hold in high honor the man of science who treads the walks of the hospital to find out the facts which will enable him to ward off sickness and death from others. This Association appeals to the public for the same sympathy and support for those who labor to lift up their unhappy brethren from moral degradation, and at the same time to do the greater work of tracing out the springs and sources of crime, and of warning the public of its share of guilt in sowing the seeds of immorality by its tastes, maxims, and usages. We love to think that the inmates of cells are unlike ourselves. ”

“ In these moral hospitals the thoughtful man, the philanthropist, and the statesman, will look for the causes of social danger and demoralization. When we begin at the prison and work up, we find opening before us all the sources of crime, all the problems of social order and disorder, all the great questions with which statesmanship, in dealing with the interests and welfare of a people, must cope when it seeks to lift up high standards of virtue and patriotism. In the most highly-civilized countries the subjects of pauperism and crime secure the most attention and thought. ”

“ There are many things which are beyond the reach of state action, in a moral point of view—things which do not come under the cognizance of laws, but which deeply affect the welfare of the whole country. At the first view our efforts seem to be limited to the justice which punishes crime, and to the charity which tries to reform the criminal, but we are soon led into a wider field of duty. We are apt to look upon the inmates of prisons as exceptional men, unlike the mass of our people. ”

“ To make the public feel that criminals are men of like passions with ourselves, and that crime is an infectious as well as a malignant disease, that its sources are not so much personal inclination as general demoralization, are the great first steps toward reform. When we feel the disease may enter our own houses and seize upon the mental and moral weakness of those we love, we are ready to study its causes and its workings. ”

“ He who masters the diagnosis of crime gains a key to the mysteries of our nature and to the secret sources of demoralization which opens to him a knowledge of the great principles of public and private reform—the true methods of a good administration of the laws. Pauperism and crime have been the subjects of earnest thought by the best and wisest men of the world, not only on account of their direct interest, but also on account of their relationship to all other matters of good government. ”

“ Many of the transactions of our capitalists are more hurtful to the welfare of our people than the acts of thieves and robbers. In the better days of American simplicity, honesty, and patriotism, these things could not have been done. No one would then dare to face a people indignant at such rapacious greed. Such influences have led to frauds, defalcations, breaches of trust. They have filled our prisons and overwhelmed many households with shame and sorrow. ”

“ The most dangerous criminal is the educated, intellectual violator of the law, for he has all the resources of art at his command—the forces of mechanics, the subtlety of chemistry, the knowledge of men's ways and passions. Learning by itself only changes the aspect of immorality. Virtue is frequently found with the simple and uneducated, and vice with the educated. ”

“ Then wealth gained by unworthy means will no longer be respected. No one can recall the events of the past few years, particularly those of the great commercial centres, without feeling there is an ebb-tide in American morals. Not a little of the glitter of our social and business life is a shining putrescence. Fungus men have shot up into financial prominence to whom a pervading deadening moral malaria is the very breath of life. ”

“ As certain plagues which sweep men into their graves cannot rage without foul air, so many crimes cannot prevail without wide-spread moral malaria. It is the greed for gold, the love of luxury in the American people, which have caused the legislative frauds, the municipal corruptions, the violations of trust which excite alarm in our land. ”

“ Crime knows no geographical limits, no boundaries of states. It is its nature to war with the welfare of the human family. It must be opposed by the united wisdom and virtue of all nationalities and of all forms of civilization. ”

“ We shall then uphold and honor those men of humanity and true statesmanship who study out the cause of moral stains as we honor and support those men of science who search out in sick-rooms and hospitals the cause, and cure the complaint, which kills the body. ”

“ Let the way of bringing offenders to justice be direct, clear, and untrammelled. The technicalities of pleading, proof, and proceedings, in many of our States, are painfully absurd. To the minds of most men a criminal trial is a mysterious jumble. ”

“ A certain breadth and reach of mind seem to mark those men who have entered upon the study of penal laws and the reformation of criminals. While there is much to condemn in our system of laws and in their administration, there is much to admire in the practical workings of many of our prisons. In some respects we are in advance of other people. Much has been done in many of our States to improve the condition of our criminals, and much more to rescue the young from vice and destruction. ”

“ I repeat here what I have said on other occasions—that, after a long experience with men in all conditions of life, after having felt, as most men, the harsh injustice springing from the strife and passion of the world, I have learned to think more kindly of the hearts of men, and to think less of their heads. ”

“ I do not doubt that some men are more prone to vice than others, but, after listening to thousands of prayers for pardon, I can hardly recall a case where I do not feel that I might have fallen as my fellow-men have done if I had been subject to the same demoralizing influences, and pressed by the same temptations. ”

“ Here, too, we have a broader field filled with men of varied phases and aspects of different civilization, in which we can study the wants and the weaknesses, the virtues and the vices, of the human race. For a series of years nearly 300,000 immigrants are annually landed at the harbor of New York. Disorder and crime are always active along the line of march of great armies. I believe there is no instance in history of a movement of the human race so vast and long continued. ”

“ The public have no confidence that the worst criminal will be punished. The worst criminal cherishes at all times a hope of escape. In every part of our country there is a vague idea that certain men of legal skill can extricate offenders without regard to the merits of their case. ”

“ They turn men's minds from selfish to unselfish fields of labor. Those who enter those fields will find in them marks of toil and care by the best human intellects. The grandest minds have worked at their intricate problems. ”

“ Their characters are formed by the civilization in which they move. They are in many respects the representative men of a country. It is a hard thing to draw an indictment against a criminal which is not in some respects an indictment of the community in which he has lived. An intelligent stranger who should visit the prisons of foreign countries, who should hear the histories of their inmates, would get a better idea of the inner workings of their civilization than could be gained by intercourse with a like number of their citizens moving in more conventional circles of society. ”

“ In each of them we should seek to find out the secret cause of disease. With regard to both we should in a large-minded way feel that the laws of moral and physical life are a thousand times more important to the multitudes of the world at large than they are to the few inmates that languish in their gloomy walls. ”

“ The objects we have in view, although they make our prisons their starting-point, are so wide in their bearing that they brought together at the London International Association, in the interests of our common humanity, men of the best minds of most countries of Europe and America. These, in spite of the differences of religion, language, and form of civilization, could act in accord in devising measures to lift up the fallen and to spread the principles of morality and justice among the peoples of the world. ”

“ They will always be problems to vex statesmanship, but they must always be battled with. In the social edifice they are like fires ever kindling in its different parts, which are to be kept under by watchfulness and care. ”

“ It is found that true statesmanship, like true religion, begins with visiting the prisoners and helping the poor. It is certain that in our own country Edward Livingston, the public man who ranks high in European regard for intellectual ability, gained his position by his great work on the penal laws of Louisiana. When it was the fashion in the scientific world to hold that men and animals were dwarfed on this continent, this work was brought forward by our friends in Europe as a proof that statesmanship was full-grown here. ”

“ But we in America have to deal with and act upon all nationalities, all phases of civilization. While these facts palliate the defects of our penal laws and their administration, they certainly make more clear and urgent the duty that we keep pace with the swift changes going on around us. ”

“ When prisons are visited by men of mind, when prisoners are looked upon with kindly eyes by those who can study their characters and learn from them the virtues, vice, and wickedness which mark our race ”