I come simply, ladies and gentlemen, to learn of these prison wardens. That has been my business annually since 1885-to journey to the Congress of these men as an outsider but inside the hearts of many of you, I am sure, as you are in mine. I have learned a great deal, and one of the great lessons I have learned as I have followed your discussions is this: it is not the men that are doing nothing that have hope. They are the pessimists, the men that stand out and see the battle going on; but these men of common sense, of practical mind, grappling with the reality of crime, standing by and watching it day and night through the years-these men who must apply the law, after the legislatures assemble and say what the will of the people is in the form of law and the courts interpret it and pronounce guilt; these men that stand in close touch with the criminal; who know not merely the letter of the penal law but the criminal himself, the human being that commits the crime; they look down into the depths of his nature; and these are the men who say to the great nation: "Hope as we do; these men can be redeemed; they can be helped and we are their saviors." That is one of the great messages that has come to me.

We are not working in despair. We are not working in hopelessness. We know the principles of our work. We know that observance of those principles, discovered in human experiences, followed faithfully by faithful and patient men, will secure results. We are not blind to the difficulties of the situation. We say first of all: "You must obey the law. It will be hard for you if you do not. We shall restrain you. Whether we can cure you or not, you shall be in a position where you will not harm society. Society must protect itself. Order and law and respect for the institutions of society come first, and if we can then help you, we shall do that. We shall put you out of power to injure these institutions for which all the past has been striving, and then we want to help you." We have no revenge. We have lost that word out of our dictionaries. Our vocabulary contains it not. The constitution of my own native State away back in the last century said: "The penal code shall be founded on principles of reformation and not of retributive justice." It took several decades to find the full meaning of that great and splendid sentence, but it is now embodied in institutions which are the Mecca of the world.

To His Honor, the Mayor, and His Excellency, the Governor of this great Mother State, where we are delighted to assemble, we offer our thanks for these words of welcome. I speak on behalf not only of those who come from the States of the Union, but from Cuba and from that splendid democracy to the north of us within Canadian borders. We have come together as a prison association to abolish the prison. The chief business of the Prison Congress of America is, first of all, to see if it be possible by studying the criminal, the physical conditions which produce him, the social environments out of which he has come, to say to society, "You can help us; you must keep these men out of prison; you must select the fit to survive and others for segregation; you must protect society from the poison that destroys in the very beginnings of life those who have a right to live." So we go out in our settlement work and encourage it. We encourage the manual training and trade schools because the first thing we do to reform the incorrigible is to teach him a trade, keep his hands busy. And if that is the way to reform, why not the way to prevent the necessity of the reformatory? We have taught boys how not to remain thieves; why not take the lesson from the reform schools and reformatories and make it possible for every boy and every girl to learn a trade by which they can produce goods which are salable upon the market, so they will not wish to become thieves?

A little boy knocked at the door of one of the mountain settlement schools and said, "Will you not receive me?" His father appealed for the boy also. He said, "I wish my boy to do something useful. You can teach him and I can not." They turned him away because there was no more room and the man in his rough dialect said with regret, though not with anger, with a sad pity for his child that could not be taught a trade, "I see it is plumb easier to find a place for the boy to learn something in the prison than in the school." How long, noble and patriotic citizens of the southland and northland, shall it be true that young men and women shall grow up without the power to learn a trade? So for awhile we must take them and try to reconstruct what ought to have been properly constructed if the city and state had done their duty and had taken a little part of the seven hundred million dollars, more or less, a year, that Mr. Eugene Smith says our crime costs, and spent it in teaching the boys and girls how to start right. These crimes are in a deep sense our crimes, and these sins our sins, that the nation, the commonwealth and the city must repent of.

I will not dwell on these things. The theme will be taken up by our splendid, our true, our faithful leader, Dr. Milligan, who is to address us. We are glad to have him with us and most happily do I yield place to him and his message. But on behalf of all this Association, we do thank you of Richmond, for this welcome and we accept it in the broad and generous spirit in which it has been spoken.

Mr. Marcuse-Truly, Dr. Milligan, I do not have to present you to this audience, but in surrendering the chair to you I wish to pledge the voice of the local committee to anything you may command. If there is anything you do not see, ask for it and we will try to give it.

THE PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS.

REV. JOHN LYNN MILLIGAN, D.D., LL.D., ALLEGHENY, PA.

We have heard with great pleasure the eloquent address of His Excellency, the Governor of Virginia. We have listened to His Honor, the Mayor, as he has opened to the members of the American Prison Congress of 1908 the gates of the beautiful, picturesque and historic city of Richmond. And tomorrow we will bow our heads in worship of Almighty God, whose goodness and mercy have enabled us to go forward in urging upon the attention of the great states of the American Union the important work of our Association. To continue the labor successfully, we must call upon the Divine Spirit to guide, instruct and control the intelligent will power of our great American people.

It delights us to remember that the glorious atmosphere of the Old Dominion encircles us. We remember she was the leading colony of the thirteen original colonies, who at the call of Patrick Henry, gave their hearts and hands to the cause of freedom and righteousness. We ought loyally to remember that Yorktown is not far away-that town near the roar of the sublime old ocean. There, on that bright October morning, when the thundering guns had been lulled, Lord Cornwallis, the haughty representative of an unthinking, cruel tyrant, surrendered his sword to a Virginia gentleman, Genl. Washington, and the long war of the American Revolution was ended. Virtue, liberty and independence had conquered. These glorious watchwords were written on the foundation stones of the new republic. These high qualities were to mark the unrolling pages of her subsequent history.

We of this Prison Association have elected to give our work to the most perplexing feature of our civilization. We have chosen the unmeasured field of crime-cause and crime-cure. It is our effort to check and quiet the hydra-headed monster as best we may. Some of us have consecrated our lives to this Christ-like service. Are we weary with the prolonged effort? Do we sigh for the want of appreciation and concurrence? Does society seem too slow and indifferent? If our weapons of warfare are to be laid aside because there are giants in the way, let us glance backward to the consecration and dedication of all the powers of body, soul and spirit of the incomparable John Howard. Shall we not take new inspiration from the radiant face of Mrs. Elizabeth Fry?

Some of the noble and rare men who were our friends and companions in this social crusade have dropped on the way. They have been taken up to their crown and welcome in that happy land where there are no prisons.

Without being minute in detail, permit me to refer briefly to some of the important work accomplished by the Prison Association since its origin.

First, the awakening of public interest in the arrest of criminals and the punishment of crime. There has been a marked change in the public conscience in the past few years. There is a growing sense of public responsibility for the existence of the criminal. Society is beginning to realize a special relation in his being what he is, and for his doing what he does. Am I in any sense my brother's keeper? is becoming a more personal question, bearing with a direct pressure upon every intelligent man's daily life. An increased interest in prisoners has been awakened, because prisoners are human beings with souls salvable by Christ's love. This impression, recognized and entertained, has had a reflex beneficial influence on official prison life and the management of prisons. The prisoner is the better in body and soul for this uplift in society's impression. Cruel and brutal treatment of prisoners will no longer be tolerated by the intelligent public. The vilest man has God-given rights which dare not be crushed out by an ignorant and vindictive prison official.

Second. The last twenty-five years has witnessed a very great improvement in the intelligence and the moral earnestness of the men who are placed in authority in our prisons. They are the molders of the character of the prison for the time being and the officer, from the highest to the lowest, should be of a high character. Then let civil service be the rule.

Third. It is long ago that we adopted "the indeterminate sentence" and it has been slow in taking a place in the states of the Union. Mr. Z. R. Brockway proposed the measure at the Cincinnati Congress in 1870, and soon thereafter the New York legislature framed the provisions into a statute which has had fame in the civilized world.

Fourth. Major R. W. McClaughry, of Leavenworth, Kansas, and Capt. Joseph Nicholson, of Detroit, Michigan, were the heroes in securing the adoption and recommendation of the Bertillon system of measurement and identification of prisoners, which holds a place now in all of our large prisons and police stations. It is almost a perfect plan in the discovery of the recidivist.

Fifth, the county jail system. Do you smile? So do I. For years we have been pounding at this venerable inheritance from England. As young and old, we have read and have always been charmed with John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress." For twelve years he was a prisoner in that primitive jail in the old