Love--this universal Good. A Howard, and a Fry, cleansed and
humanized our prisons, to find this Good; and in the chambers of all
our hearts it is to be found, by labouring eyes and loving hands.

Why all our harsh enactments? Is it from experience of the strength
of vice in ourselves that we cage, chain, torture, and hang men? Are
none of us indebted to friendly hands, careful advisers; to the
generous, trusting guidance, solace, of some gentler being, who has
loved us, despite the evil that is in _us_--for our little Good, and
has nurtured that Good with smiles and tears and prayers? O, we know
not how like we are to those whom we despise! We know not how many
memories of kith and kin the murderer carries to the gallows--how
much honesty of heart the felon drags with him to the hulks.

There is Good in All. Dodd, the forger, was a better man than most
of us: Eugene Aram, the homicide, would turn his foot from a worm.
Do not mistake us. Society demands, requires that these madmen
should be rendered harmless. There is no nature dead to all Good.
Lady Macbeth would have slain the old king, Had he not resembled her
father as he slept.

It is a frequent thought, but a careless and worthless one, because
never acted on, that the same energies, the same will to great
vices, had given force to great virtues. Do we provide the
opportunity? Do we _believe_ in Good? If we are ourselves deceived
in any one, is not all, thenceforth, deceit? if treated with
contempt, is not the whole world clouded with scorn? if visited with
meanness, are not all selfish? And if from one of our frailer
fellow-creatures we receive the blow, we cease to believe in women.
Not the breast at which we have drank life--not the sisterly hands