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fill the important office of inspectors. These fre-quent changes have produced a very great increase of expenses, and materially tended to prevent suita-ble and important improvements in the general sys-tem. 2d. The number of pardons that have been grant-ed, has been attended with most serious injury, and very much prevented the good effects that the system might otherwise have produced. Pardon should be granted only on the discovery of facts unknown at the trial, which, if known, would probably have pro-duced an acquittal. In fact, it may be truly said, that under a mild system, pardons materially contri-bute to the increase of crimes. 3d. In the New-York prison, the rooms lodge each about twenty convicts, and owing to so many being brought together every night, they corrupt each other, and thus prevent complete order in the prison, and all chance of reformation is effectually defeated; the elder criminals serve as teachers to the younger, and prepare them for the commission of greater crimes than those for which they have been convicted. Thus the New-York prison, in place of answering the pur-pose for which the convicts are confined, viz. their reformation, becomes a nursery and seminary of vice. 4th. The authority given to the inspectors to in-flict corporal punishment for violating the laws of the prison, respecting good order, &;c. has no doubt had a very injurious effect, for, it is directly opposite to the mild system that ought to prevail in a peni-tentiary. It must tend to harden the minds of the convicts, and materially lessen the chances of reform-ation. To adopt such a mode of punishment, isextremely unwise, because the more mild plan of occasional confinement in solitary cells on bread and water, has been proved by experience, effectually to answer the most important purposes of strict and rigid discipline. The reasons above assigned are, in my opinion, sufficient to show why the Penitentiary