country, the "chaotic battle-field of Frost and Fire;" a country
of savage glaciers, granite mountains, of foul jungles, unhewed
forests, quaking bogs;--which we shall have our own ados to make
arable and habitable, I think! We must stick by it, however;--of
all enterprises the impossiblest is that of getting out of it,
and shifting into another. To work, then, one and all; hands to
work!


[March 1, 1850.] No. II. MODEL PRISONS.

The deranged condition of our affairs is a universal topic among
men at present; and the heavy miseries pressing, in their rudest
shape, on the great dumb inarticulate class, and from this, by a
sure law, spreading upwards, in a less palpable but not less
certain and perhaps still more fatal shape on all classes to the
very highest, are admitted everywhere to be great, increasing and
now almost unendurable. How to diminish them,--this is every
man's question. For in fact they do imperatively need
diminution; and unless they can be diminished, there are many
other things that cannot very long continue to exist beside them.
A serious question indeed, How to diminish them!

Among the articulate classes, as they may be called, there are
two ways of proceeding in regard to this. One large body of the
intelligent and influential, busied mainly in personal affairs,
accepts the social iniquities, or whatever you may call them, and
the miseries consequent thereupon; accepts them, admits them to
be extremely miserable, pronounces them entirely inevitable,
incurable except by Heaven, and eats its pudding with as little