hard one. The battle of life has gone against you--whether by your own
fault or by hard fortune, it matters not, so far as the fact is
concerned; this thanksgiving-day finds you locked in here, with broken
lives, and wearing the badge of crime. God alone knows the secrets of
each throbbing heart before me, and how it is that you have come to
this. Fellow-men, children of my Father in heaven, putting myself for
the moment in your place, the bitterness of your lot is real and
terrible to me. For some of you there is no happier prospect for this
life than to toil within these walls by day, and sleep in yonder cells
by night, through the weary, slow-dragging years, and then to die, with
only the hands of hired attendants to wipe the death-sweat from your
brows; and then to be put in a convict's coffin, and taken up on the
hill yonder, and laid in a lonely grave. My God! this is terrible!"

An unexpected dramatic effect followed these words. The heads of many of
the convicts fell forward on their breasts, as if struck with sudden
paralysis. They were the men who were in for life, and the horror of it
overcame them. The silence was broken by sobbings all over the room. The
officers and visitors on the platform were weeping. The angel of pity
hovered over, the place, and the glow of human sympathy had melted those
stony hearts. A thousand strong men were thrilled with the touch of
sympathy, and once more the sacred fountain of tears was unsealed. These
convicts were men, after all, and deep down under the rubbish of their
natures there was still burning the spark of a humanity not yet extinct.
It was wonderful to see the softened expression of their faces. Yes,
they were men, after all, responding to the voice of sympathy, which had
been but too strange to many of them all their evil lives. Many of them
had inherited hard conditions; they were literally conceived in sin and
born in iniquity; they grew up in the midst of vice. For them pure and
holy lives were a moral impossibility. Evil with them was hereditary,