“The first man created, so divine history tells us, proved a delinquent, and God’s sentence upon him was to go forth and _till the soil_; can man to-day impose a better sentence upon our delinquents?”
Bishop Tihen dwelt upon the importance of investigating the causes of crime. “If you go down into the slums, and find that the chief cause of crime is the unfit habitations, do not condemn the habitations and stop there; find out the owner of them who profits from the dollars received for their rent, and denounce him. If you find the poor orphan girl working in the big department store at wages at which you know she cannot live upon, do not wait until you find her a few months later when she has become a fallen woman through the necessity to which hunger has driven her, and then try to reform her; go at once to the proprietor and demand that she receive living wages.”
Maud Ballington Booth electrified the great audience with accounts of what had been accomplished by the Gospel of Love and Hope. She told briefly of her work of taking men from prisons and giving them a chance on the farms and in the homes of our people. She finds positions for them when they can be recommended, and during the last fifteen years she recalled that many thousands have been saved by such treatment from going back to lives of crime. “It’s hope that they need, and there’s hope for all of them; if there’s hope for the millionaire, there’s hope for the burglar; if there’s hope for the politician, there’s hope for the man behind prison walls.”
The annual sermon was preached by Frank L. Loveland, of Topeka, Kansas. His address was eminently practical. He thought that prevention was better than rescue. The work of the “Good Samaritan” was good, but it were far better to extirpate the robbers. In these days the robbers are not the wild Bedouins of the desert, but society which tolerates conditions which bring forth a crop of criminals.
The report of the standing committee on Prison Discipline was presented by Warden Scott of the New Hampshire Prison, and was heard with great interest.
“Rules and regulations degrading in their character have long since been found to be more a menace to our system of prison discipline than otherwise. We have seen the downcast eye, the striped suit, short hair cut, lockstep, the dark cell and various forms of methods of corporal punishment replaced by more humane, more sensible regulations, and venture the assertion that in no prison in the country where this has been done will one fail to find the standard of discipline improved.