Both these classes we keep idle or at unproductive labour, and each criminal costs us annually in our prisons more than the wages of an honest agricultural labourer.
We allow over a hundred thousand persons known to have no means of subsistence but by crime, to remain at large and prey upon the community, and many thousand children to grow up before our eyes in ignorance and vice, to supply trained criminals for the next generation.
This, in a country which boasts of its rapid increase in wealth, of its enormous commerce and gigantic manufactures, of its mechanical skill and scientific knowledge, of its high civilization and its pure Christianity,--I can but term a state of social barbarism.

We also boast of our love of justice, and that the law protects rich and poor alike, yet we retain money fines as a punishment, and make the very first steps to obtain justice a matter of expense--in both cases a barbarous injustice, or denial of justice to the poor.

Again, our laws render it possible, that, by mere neglect of a legal form, and contrary to his own wish and intention, a man's property may all go to a stranger, and his own children be left destitute.

Such cases have happened through the operation of the laws of inheritance of landed property; and that such unnatural injustice is possible among us, shows that we are in a state of social barbarism.

One more example to justify my use of the term, and I have done.