subject of woman’s position.  The Methodist conference passed a resolution in favor of the amendment by a unanimous vote.  I was in the State during the intense heat of May and June, speaking every evening to large audiences; in the afternoon to women alone, and preaching every Sunday in some pulpit.  The Methodists, Universalists, Unitarians, and Quakers all threw open their churches to the apostles of the new gospel of equality for women.  We spoke in jails, prisons, asylums, depots, and the open air.  Wherever there were ears to hear, we lifted up our voices, and, on the wings of the wind, the glad tidings were carried to the remote corners of the State, and the votes of forty thousand men, on election day, in favor of the amendment were so many testimonials to the value of the educational work accomplished.

I made many valuable acquaintances, on that trip, with whom I have maintained lifelong friendships.  One pleasant day I passed in the home of Governor Bagley and his wife, with a group of pretty children.  I found the Governor deeply interested in prison reform.  He had been instrumental in passing a law giving prisoners lights in their cells and pleasant reading matter until nine o’clock.  His ideas of what prisons should be, as unfolded that day, have since been fully realized in the grand experiment now being successfully tried at Elmira, New York.

I visited the State prison at Jackson, and addressed seven hundred men and boys, ranging from seventy down to seventeen years of age.  Seated on the dais with the chaplain, I saw them file in to dinner, and, while they were eating, I had an opportunity to study the sad, despairing faces before me.  I shall never forget the hopeless expression of one young man, who had just been sentenced for twenty years, nor how ashamed I felt that one of my own sex, trifling with two lovers, had fanned the jealousy of one against the other, until the tragedy ended in the death of one and the almost lifelong imprisonment of the other.  If girls should be truthful and transparent in any relations in life, surely it is in those of love, involving the strongest passions of which human nature is capable.  As the chaplain told me the sad story, and I noticed the prisoner’s refined face and well-shaped head, I felt that the young man was not under the right influences to learn the lesson he needed.  Fear, coercion, punishment, are the masculine remedies for moral weakness, but statistics show their failure for centuries.  Why not change the system and try the education of the moral and intellectual faculties, cheerful surroundings, inspiring influences?  Everything in our present system tends to lower the physical vitality, the self-respect, the moral tone, and to harden instead of reforming the criminal.